An estimated 7,099 languages are spoken throughout the world today. Almost a third of them are endangered -- spoken by dwindling numbers -- while just 23 languages represent more than half of the global population.
For years, researchers have been interested in the similarities seen across human languages. A new study led by University of Arizona researcher Masha Fedzechkina suggests that some of those similarities may be based on the human brain's preference for efficient information processing. "If we look at languages of the world, they are very different on the surface, but they also share a lot of underlying commonalities, often called linguistic universals or cross-linguistic generalizations," said Fedzechkina, an assistant professor in the UA Department of Linguistics and lead author of the study, published in the journal Psychological Science. "Most theories assume the reasons why languages have these cross-linguistic universals is because they're in some way constrained by the human brain," Fedzechkina said. "If these linguistic universals are indeed real, and if we understand their causes, then it can tell us something about how language is acquired or processed by the human brain, which is one of the central questions in language sciences."
Fedzechkina and her collaborators conducted a study in which two groups of English-speaking-only individuals were each taught, over a three-day period, a different miniature artificial language designed by the experimenters. The two languages were structured differently from each other, and, importantly, neither was structured like the participants' native English. In both groups, participants were taught two ways to express the same ideas. When later tested verbally -- asked to describe actions in a video -- participants, in the...Read more...
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