Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Notably, while English tends to prefer shorter before longercomplements (explained to us a very clear effect), Japanesedisplays the opposite tendency. Far less cross-linguistic workhas investigated possible differences in the ordering of nounswithin conjunctions (“binomials’), although a corpus studysuggests that the same factors predict binomial ordering inJapanese and English. To investigate the issue experimentally,we report Japanese and English speakers’ productions of namesof the members of couples that they knew personally. Resultsconfirm that conceptual accessibility is the most importantfactor in the ordering of familiar name binomials in bothlanguages. That is, both groups tended to name the memberthey felt closer to first. Length (syllables/mora) was not asignificant predictor in either language. Differences in thepreferred order of verbs’ complements are then attributable toother factors, possibly a very general preference to minimizethe average distance between semantically related elements.