Word frequency is a cue to word order for adults: Validating an online method with speakers of Italian and Turkish for more inclusive psycholinguistic testing

Abstract

Acquiring the relative order of function and content words is a fundamental aspect of language development, and previous studies show that infants develop prelexical representations of this word order. As functors are more frequent than content words, they serve as anchors with respect to which the positions of other words can readily be encoded. This frequency-based bootstrapping strategy has been shown to be used both by infants and adults. However, only a handful of languages, mainly spoken in Western countries, have been tested so far. One hurdle to more inclusive testing is the lack of laboratory facilities in some geographical areas of the world. Online testing is a useful tool to overcome this difficulty. The current study, therefore, implements and validates an online version of an artificial grammar learning paradigm originally developed for laboratory use to test the frequency-based anchoring effect on adults in typologically different languages, Italian and Turkish. Italian has functor-initial word order, while Turkish is functor-final. Our study thus has two related goals. We test whether previous lab-based results by Gervain et al. (2013) with Italian adults are replicable using online testing. Additionally, we leverage online testing to assess a hitherto understudied language, Turkish, which has opposite word order properties compared to Italian. Our findings indicate that online testing can efficiently reproduce laboratory-based results: Italian adults in our online study show similar word order preferences to those tested in the laboratory earlier. Further, we found that Turkish participants have opposite word order preferences, as we predicted. These findings pave the way for testing the frequency-based bootstrapping hypothesis on a more inclusive and diverse sample of languages than previously available.