Constraints on the lexicons of human languages have cognitive roots present in baboons (papio papio)
Abstract – Universals in language are hard to come by, yet one candidate is that words across the lexicons of the world’s languages are, by and large, connected: When a word applies to two objects, it also applies to any objects “between” those two. A natural hypothesis is that the source of this regularity is a learning bias for connected patterns, a hypothesis supported by recent experimental studies. Is this learning bias typically human? Is it language related? We ask whether other animals show the same bias. We present an experiment that reveals that learning biases for connectedness are present in baboons, suggesting that the shape of the world’s languages (both content and logical words) has roots in general, nonlinguistic, cognitive biases.