Revisiting the Suffixing Preference: Native-Language Affixation Patterns Influence Perception of Sequences

Similarities among the world’s languages may be driven by universal features of human cognition or perception. For example, in many languages, complex words are formed by adding suffixes to the ends of simpler words, but adding prefixes is much less common: Why might this be? Previous research suggests this is due to a domain-general perceptual bias: Sequences differing at their ends are perceived as more similar to each other than sequences differing at their beginnings. However, as is typical in psycholinguistic research, the evidence comes exclusively from one population—English speakers—who have extensive experience with suffixing. Here, we provided a much stronger test of this claim by investigating perceptual-similarity judgments in speakers of Kîîtharaka, a heavily prefixing Bantu language spoken in rural Kenya. We found that Kîîtharaka speakers (N = 72) showed the opposite judgments to English speakers (N = 51), which calls into question whether a universal bias in human perception can explain the suffixing preference in the world’s languages.