Word Frequency Is a Cue to Word Order Preferences for Adults: A Study with Italian and Turkish Native Speakers

Functor and content words are universal features across languages. Functors define and support sentences in the sense of grammar while content words contain lexical meanings. In this study, the anchoring hypothesis, based on the frequency and position of functors, was investigated in native speakers of Turkish and Italian adults. The present research includes an online artificial grammar learning experiment to investigate the role of frequently used items in parsing grammatical structure in newly presented linguistic materials. Our results indicate that adults with typologically different native languages have a similar preference for the distribution of frequent items as their native language. The preferences of the Turkish and Italian speakers were significantly different as predicted. In the following analysis we conducted with combined data with Gervain et al.'s (2013), a difference in preference between functor-initial and functor-final languages is seen, which supports the previous results, and the participants made preferences similar to the statistical distribution in their native languages. These predicts that functors provide cues about word order cross-linguistically, and adults use the statistical distribution features of their native language while learning new linguistic materials.