Ling-Lunch returns this week at its usual time and place with a talk by Masatoshi Koizumi.
Speaker: Masatoshi Koizumi (Tohoku University)
Title: On the Subject-Object Word Order Preference in Sentence Comprehension (and Production)
Date/Time: Thursday, 9/20, 12:30-1:45p
Room: 32-D461
The processing load of sentences with three different word
orders (i.e., VOS, VSO, and SVO) in Kaqchikel Maya was investigated
using a sentence plausibility judgment task. VOS sentences were
processed faster than VSO and SVO sentences. This confirmed the
traditional analysis in Mayan linguistics that the syntactically
determined basic word order is VOS in Kaqchikel, as in many other
Mayan languages. More importantly, the result revealed that the
preference for subject-object word order in sentence comprehension
previously observed in other languages is not universal; rather,
processing load in sentence comprehension is greatly affected by the
syntactic nature of individual languages.