Word order affects the time course of sentence formulation in Tzeltal

Abstract

The scope of planning during sentence formulation is known to be flexible, as it can be influenced by speakers' communicative goals and language production pressures (among other factors). Two eye-tracked picture description experiments tested whether the time course of formulation is also modulated by grammatical structure and thus whether differences in linear word order across languages affect the breadth and order of conceptual and linguistic encoding operations. Native speakers of Tzeltal [a primarily verb–object–subject (VOS) language] and Dutch [a subject–verb–object (SVO) language] described pictures of transitive events. Analyses compared speakers' choice of sentence structure across events with more accessible and less accessible characters as well as the time course of formulation for sentences with different word orders. Character accessibility influenced subject selection in both languages in subject-initial and subject-final sentences, ruling against a radically incremental formulation process. In Tzeltal, subject-initial word orders were preferred over verb-initial orders when event characters had matching animacy features, suggesting a possible role for similarity-based interference in influencing word order choice. Time course analyses revealed a strong effect of sentence structure on formulation: In subject-initial sentences, in both Tzeltal and Dutch, event characters were largely fixated sequentially, while in verb-initial sentences in Tzeltal, relational information received priority over encoding of either character during the earliest stages of formulation. The results show a tight parallelism between grammatical structure and the order of encoding operations carried out during sentence formulation

Cross-linguistic psycholinguistics and its critical role in theory development: early beginnings and recent advances

“…In order to select a suitable sentence initial verb, information about the relational structure of the event presumably must be planned early, possibly earlier than in subject-initial languages. Comparing sentence formulation in the two language types offers a way of assessing the extent to which word order may influence message and sentence-level planning processes (Norcliffe, Konopka, Brown, & Levinson, 2015). Verbs in verb-initial languages also often have (rich) agreement morphology specifying information about their arguments, which occur only later in the sentence.…”

“…In an eye-tracked picture description study, Norcliffe, Konopka, Brown, and Levinson (2015) investigate the effects of word order variations on the time-course of sentence formulation in Dutch and Tzeltal, a Mayan language spoken in southern Mexico. Tzeltal, like Basque, is a language with complex verbal agreement morphology, which encodes information about both verbal arguments.…”

Is the subject-before-object preference universal? An event-related potential study in the Kaqchikel Mayan language

“…Both these theories correctly predict that SO word order is preferred in languages in which the subject precedes the object in the syntactically basic word order (SO languages). Sentence-processing studies conducted so far have all targeted SO languages, except for a few recent ones such as Clemens et al (2015) and Norcliffe, Konopka, Brown, and Levinson (2015). Hence, it remains unclear whether the preference for the SO word order is a reflection of word order in individual languages or a reflection of more universal human cognitive features.…”

Turn-Taking in Human Communicative Interaction

“…When participants are shown pictures of simple transitive or intransitive scenes (e.g., boy kicking ball, girl running), it takes about 1500 ms before speech output begins Gleitman et al, 2007). Interestingly, what happens within this 1500 ms is language-dependent -for example verb-first languages show rather different visual scanning of the pictures than verb medial languages (Norcliffe et al, 2015), but the latencies remain similar.…”