Psychology Today – David Adger, Ph.D.
“Where do these rules come from? The common-sense answer is that we learn them: as English speakers grow up, they hear the people around them saying many, many sentences, and from these they generalize the English order; Thai speakers, hearing Thai sentences, generalize the opposite order (and English-Thai bilinguals get both). That’s why, if you present an English or Thai speaker with the wrong order, they’ll immediately detect something is wrong. But this common-sense answer raises an interesting puzzle.” (more)