Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In this paper we investigate a hypothesized cognitive bias forisomorphic mappings between conceptual structure and linearorder in the noun phrase. This bias has been proposed as a pos-sible explanation for a striking asymmetry in the typology ofthe noun phrase–linear orders which place the adjective clos-est to the noun, then the numeral, then the demonstrative, areover-represented in the world’s languages. Previous experi-mental work has provided evidence that an isomorphism biasaffects English-speaking learners’ inferences about the relativeorder of modifiers in an artificial language. Here, we use thesilent gesture paradigm to explore whether the isomorphismbias influences spontaneous gestures innovated by participantsin a modality with which they have relatively little prior experi-ence. We find that gesture string order largely conforms to thesame striking pattern found in noun phrase typology, support-ing the role of the isomorphism bias in shaping the emergenceof language (and language-like) systems.