Word order harmony describes the tendency, found across the world's languages, to consistently order syntactic heads relative to dependents. It is one of the most well-known and well-studied typological universals. Almost since it was first noted by Greenberg (1963), there has been disagreement about what role, if any, the cognitive system plays in driving harmony. Recently, a series of studies using artificial language learning experiments reported that harmonic noun phrase word orders were preferred over non-harmonic orders by English-speaking adults and children (Culbertson et al., 2012; Culbertson & Newport, 2015, 2017). However, this evidence is potentially confounded by the fact that English is itself a harmonic language (Goldberg, 2013). Here we sought to extend the results from these studies by exploring whether learners who have substantial experience with a non-harmonic language still showed a bias for harmonic patterns during learning. We found that monolingual French- and Hebrew-speaking children, whose language has a non-harmonic noun phrase order (N Adj, Num N) nevertheless preferred harmonic patterns when learning an artificial language. We also found evidence for a harmony bias across several populations of adult learners, although this interacted in complex ways with their L2 experience. Our results suggest that transfer from the L1 cannot explain the preference for harmony found in previous studies. Moreover, they provide the strongest evidence yet that a cognitive bias for harmony is a plausible candidate for shaping linguistic typology.

词序和谐描述了在世界各地的语言中发现的趋向一致地相对于家属来排序句法首字母的趋势。它是最著名和研究最充分的类型学普适性之一。自格林伯格（Greenberg，1963）首次提出以来，就认知系统在促进和谐中的作用（如果有的话）一直存在分歧。最近，一系列使用人工语言学习实验的研究表明，英语成人和儿童优先选择谐和名词短语单词顺序而不是非谐顺序（Culbertson等人，2012; Culbertson＆Newport，2015,2017）。但是，英语本身就是和声语言这一事实​​可能会混淆这一证据（Goldberg，2013年）。在这里，我们试图通过探索对非调和语言有丰富经验的学习者是否仍在学习过程中表现出对和声模式的偏见来扩展这些研究的结果。我们发现，会说单语的法语和希伯来语儿童在学习人工语言时，其语言具有非谐和的名词短语顺序（N Adj，Num N），仍然偏向谐和模式。我们还发现了一些成年学习者群体之间存在和谐偏差的证据，尽管这与他们的L2体验以复杂的方式相互作用。我们的研究结果表明，从L1转移不能解释先前研究中对和谐的偏爱。此外，它们提供了最有力的证据，表明对和谐的认知偏见是塑造语言类型学的合理候选者。