On the universality of cognitive biases in natural language: The case of noun phrase internal ordersing

The present study experimentally investigates the order of NP-internal modifiers in gesture modality as practiced by Turkish speaking participants in an attempt to understand the natural order within NPs cross linguistically, whether the participants’ preferences reflect a homomorphism bias, and whether their preferences are influenced by their native language. For these purposes, Turkish-speaking participants (N=44) randomly assigned to two conditions where access to their native language was suppressed in the first block (suppression-first condition) or where access to their native language was suppressed in the second block (no-suppression-first condition). Under both conditions, the participants were asked to improvise gestures to describe visuals showing geometric shape clusters varying in distance, number and features. Results of the experiment indicate that the majority of gesture strings produced by Turkish speaking participants is homomorphic and the mostly preferred NP internal order is Dem