AbstractWe investigate the order in which speakers produce the proper names of couples they know personally in English and Japanese, two languages with markedly different constituent word orders. Results demonstrate that speakers of both languages tend to produce the name of the person they feel closer to before the name of the other member of the couple (N = 180). In this way, speakers’ unique personal histories give rise to a remarkably systematic linguistic generalization in both English and Japanese. Insofar as closeness serves as an index of cognitive accessibility, the current work demonstrates that systematicity emerges from a domain-general property of memory.

Native speakers strongly disprefer novel formulations when a conventional alternative expresses the same intended message, presumably because the more conventional form competes with the novel form. In five studies, second language (L2) speakers were less influenced by competing alternatives than native speakers. L2 speakers accepted novel interpretable sentences more readily than native speakers, and were somewhat less likely to offer competing alternatives as paraphrases or to prefer competing alternatives in forced‐choice tasks. They were unaffected by exposure to competing alternatives immediately before judgments. Reduced sensitivity to competing alternatives was confirmed by L2 speakers’ greater divergence from native speakers on judgments for novel formulations compared to familiar ones. Reduced sensitivity to competing alternatives also predicts noisier linguistic representations; consistent with this, L2 speakers performed worse on a verbatim recognition task, with performance correlating with more nativelike judgments. Proficiency was a modest predictor of judgments, but transfer effects were not. Open Practices This article has been awarded a Preregistered Research Design badge. Preregistration for this study's research design and analyses is publicly accessible through AsPredicted.org. Direct links to the five preregistered experiments are available in the Supporting Information file. Learn more about the Open Practices badges from the Center for Open Science: https://osf.io/tvyxz/wiki.

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People who learn a new language as adults tend to judge unconventional utterances more leniently than native speakers do, while both groups’ ratings on acceptable utterances tend to align more closely. Experiment 1 confirms this asymmetry with 61 English-speaking undergraduate students enrolled in Spanish classes. The finding that unconventional utterances are particularly hard for learners to fully appreciate raises the possibility that conventional utterances may not statistically preempt unconventional paraphrases for adult learners. To investigate this, we report a preregistered study that provides the undergraduates learning Spanish with three days of exposure to conventional Spanish sentences involving one of two sets of constructions. They performed self-paced reading initially and after exposure. While native Spanish speakers displayed the expected slow-down when reading the unconventional sentences (Exp 2), but the learners did not, regardless of exposure or proficiency. At the same time, judgment data reveal that even beginning learners at the initial assessment explicitly rate unconventional sentences somewhat lower than conventional sentences, and the recognition of unconventionality increases with proficiency. Moreover, the judgment data reveal an effect of statistical preemption, particularly on intermediate learners, as predicted: repeatedly witnessing conventional sentences significantly impacted subsequent ratings of unconventional paraphrases. Collectively, the current findings indicate that adult learners do take advantage of statistical preemption to identify unacceptable sentences, but their ability to recognize unacceptability in real-time lags far behind.