There is a long-standing debate in cognitive science surrounding the source of commonalities among languages of the world. Indeed, there are many potential explanations for such commonalities—accidents of history, common processes of language change, memory limitations, constraints on linguistic representations, and so on. Recent research has used psycholinguistic experiments to provide empirical evidence linking common linguistic patterns to specific features of human cognition, but these experiments tend to use English speakers, who in many cases have direct experience with the common patterns of interest. Here we highlight the importance of testing populations whose languages go against cross-linguistic trends. We investigate whether adult monolingual speakers of Kîîtharaka, which has an unusual way of ordering words, mirror the word-order preferences of English speakers. We find that they do, supporting the hypothesis that universal cognitive representations play a role in shaping word order.

中文翻译：

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词序中的普遍认知偏差：语言与之相反的说话者的证据

围绕世界语言之间的共性来源，认知科学界存在着长期的争论。事实上，对于这种共性有很多潜在的解释——历史的偶然、语言变化的共同过程、记忆限制、语言表征的限制等等。最近的研究使用心理语言学实验来提供将常见语言模式与人类认知的特定特征联系起来的经验证据，但这些实验倾向于使用英语使用者，他们在许多情况下对感兴趣的常见模式有直接的经验。在这里，我们强调测试语言与跨语言趋势相反的人群的重要性。我们调查了说基塔拉卡语的成年单语者是否反映了说英语的人的词序偏好，基塔拉卡语有一种不寻常的单词排序方式。我们发现确实如此，这支持了普遍认知表征在塑造词序方面发挥作用的假设。