'Bliffen slagum shen.' (VIDEO)

University of Rochester

Caption

Translation: "Singer hunter chop." Unlike English, the artificial languages used in the study have free word order. When the subject and object could be easily confused, participants chose to reshape the language by using case marker to make their meaning clear. This created the same pattern seen in naturally occurring languages such as Japanese and Korean and may help to explain why so many of the world’s languages share similar structures.

Credit

The Human Language Processing Lab at the University of Rochester (<a href="http://www.hlp.rochester.edu">www.hlp.rochester.edu</a>)

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