The strategy we use to distinguish these possibilities exploits universal preferences among types of words, all of which are absent from a speaker's language (see also refs. English speakers showing preferences for syllables like blif over lbif might be demonstrating knowledge of the relevant general universals, or they might be reflecting only their knowledge that English has words relevantly like blif (e.g., blip) but not lbif. The matter is difficult to resolve because it is not easy to distinguish active knowledge of a universal regularity from “mere analogy” with memorized expressions that happen to exhibit that regularity. The question at hand, then, is whether language universals are active in the brains of all speakers, or mere relics of systematic language change and its distal generic causes? For example, words beginning with lb have a tendency to decline relative to those beginning with bl because the former are more frequently mispronounced or misperceived. Language universals are not mentally represented-they are only statistical tendencies, shaped by generic (auditory and motor) constraints on language evolution ( 8). Rather, speakers simply know regularities (either structural or statistical) concerning words in their own language. The alternative denies that speakers have knowledge of language universals. One view holds that language universals form part of the language faculty of all speakers ( 5– 7). But the significance of such observations is unclear. These universals, for example, assert that the sound sequence lbif makes a poor word, whereas the sequence blif is better: Languages always make use of words like blif before (as in Russian) resorting to words like lbif. Empirical support for such restrictions comes from linguistic universals: regularities exhibited across the world's languages. They disagree on whether such regularities reflect the properties of linguistic experience, auditory perception, and motor control ( 1, 2) or universal, possibly innate, and domain-specific restrictions on language structure ( 3– 5, **). Both sides of this controversy presuppose that people have some knowledge of abstract linguistic regularities. nurture” debate concerns the origin of speakers' knowledge of their language. We conclude that language universals are neither relics of language change nor are they artifacts of generic limitations on auditory perception and motor control-they reflect universal linguistic knowledge, active in speakers' brains. Likewise, the aversion of universally dispreferred onsets by Korean speakers is not explained by English proficiency or by several phonetic and phonological properties of Korean. The misperception of universally ill-formed clusters is unlikely to be due to a simple auditory failure. We show that universally dispreferred onset clusters are more frequently misperceived than universally preferred ones, indicating that Korean speakers consider the former cluster-type more ill-formed. Our demonstration exploits speakers' well known tendency to misperceive ill-formed clusters. We demonstrate such preferences among Korean speakers, whose language lacks initial C 1C 2 clusters altogether. Across languages, certain onset clusters (e.g., lb) are dispreferred (e.g., systematically under-represented) relative to others (e.g., bl). Our case study concerns the universal restrictions on initial consonant sequences, onset clusters (e.g., bl in block). Do speakers know universal restrictions on linguistic elements that are absent from their language? We report an experimental test of this question.
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