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Cognitive accessibility predicts word order of couples’ names in English and Japanese

  • Karina Tachihara and Adele E. Goldberg EMAIL logo
From the journal Cognitive Linguistics

Abstract

We investigate the order in which speakers produce the proper names of couples they know personally in English and Japanese, two languages with markedly different constituent word orders. Results demonstrate that speakers of both languages tend to produce the name of the person they feel closer to before the name of the other member of the couple (N = 180). In this way, speakers’ unique personal histories give rise to a remarkably systematic linguistic generalization in both English and Japanese. Insofar as closeness serves as an index of cognitive accessibility, the current work demonstrates that systematicity emerges from a domain-general property of memory.

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Miah Pitcher for suggesting we study the order of proper names and to Miah, Anne Marie Wright and Aditya Cowsik for running a pilot version on English. We are also grateful to Roger Levy and Zoey Liu for discussion, and to Ting Qian for statistical advice. Finally, we are grateful to three anonymous reviewers, and to Lynn Anthonissen, Peter Petré, and John Newman for very helpful feedback on an earlier draft.

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Received: 2019-04-23
Revised: 2019-09-26
Accepted: 2019-11-28
Published Online: 2020-02-15
Published in Print: 2020-06-25

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