2026-10-12T16:07:49Z https://api.figshare.com/v2/oai

oai:figshare.com:article/33803209 2026-09-15T15:33:27Z portal_1197 item_type_3 month_year_09_2026

The cognitive and interactional causes of regularity in language Elizabeth Wonnacott (11675335) Kenny Smith (141970) Olga Fehér (24897268) Anna Samara (11675332) Amy Perfors (6940997) Helen Brown (423601) Kate Swoboda (24897277) Psycholinguistics Cognitive psychology Comparative linguistics Migrated from ePrints The languages of the world are superficially rather different: they employ different sounds and build complex utterances in different ways. However, all languages seem to share a common set of structural properties. Where do these fundamental properties of language come from? One influential hypothesis suggests that they are a reflection of a highly-constraining blueprint for language, which children impose on language during learning. An alternative possibility is that these properties might be due to weaker biases in learners, which have a very small impact for a particular child learning a particular language, but have a strong effect as a result of the transmission of language over thousands of episodes of language learning. This grant seeks to address both these hypotheses. One strand of research applies artificial language learning methods, where children and adults attempt to learn miniature languages, to test for differences between adults and child learners, and the extent to which single learners can re-shape a language. A second strand features experiments where adult participants learn, transmit and interact using artificial languages, to simulate the transmission and use of language in a population and its consequences for linguistic structure.<br><br>Data record is empty and references to three separate data records at the Edinburgh DataShare and OSF archives attached to the project. These are listed below as 'other repositories'. Child and adult participants were tested individually in the laboratory. Participants interacted with a computer program that automatically trained and tested them and recorded their output data. Every experiment was overseen by an experimenter. The precise methods varied according to the particular study. 2017-06-16T00:00:00Z Dataset Dataset 10.82444/warw.33803209.v1 https://figshare.com/articles/dataset/The_cognitive_and_interactional_causes_of_regularity_in_language/33803209 CC BY 4.0