Miniature language learning has been widely used to study the causality of language universals. However, factors that have been shown to affect language acquisition in other paradigms are understudied in miniature language learning, which calls into question results that claim to uncover universal biases. In this dissertation, I ask how the…

The tendency for negation to appear early in the sentence, dubbed the "Neg-First principle" by Horn (1989:452), has been observed in the domains of typology, language contact, and language acquisition. Based on evidence from these fields, scholars have speculated about the source and universality of Neg-First biases affecting language…

In five picture-word interference experiments, this article explores the gender-congruity effect in Dutch in two languages, Spanish and Catalan. Performance was not affected by the relationship between the gender of the picture and the gender of the word. Results show that the gender-congruity effect is not a universal effect, but varies from…