Inês C. Ferreira · 14 February 2025
Verbal language, one of the hallmarks of human beings, enables us to express intricate thoughts, transmit cultural knowledge, and connect through generations. It is also one of the most studied domains in disciplines ranging from social sciences to neuroscience. Within this broad realm, the suffixing bias has turned out to be a particularly compelling phenomenon that continues to fascinate researchers as they attempted to provide an answer to the following question: Why do most world's languages use suffixes more than prefixes to convey grammatical meanings like tense or number? And what is this related to? Our general cognition? Is it language-specific? Or even an accidental distribution caused by some random factors that are not related to language cognition per se?