TY - JOUR
T1 - Is the subject-before-object preference universal? An event-related potential study in the Kaqchikel Mayan language
AU - Yasunaga, Daichi
AU - Yano, Masataka
AU - Yasugi, Yoshiho
AU - Koizumi, Masatoshi
N1 - Funding Information:
The work for the present study was partially supported by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science under Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (S) [No. 22222001, PI: Masatoshi Koizumi] and (A) [No. 15H02603, PI: Masatoshi Koizumi].
Publisher Copyright:
© 2015 The Author(s). Published by Taylor & Francis.
PY - 2015/10/21
Y1 - 2015/10/21
N2 - The processing load of sentences with different word orders in the Kaqchikel Mayan language was investigated using event-related potentials. We observed a P600 for subject-verb-object and verb-subject-object sentences as compared to verb-object-subject (VOS) sentences, suggesting that VOS order is easier to process than the other orders. This is consistent with the traditional interpretation in Mayan linguistics that the syntactically determined basic word order is VOS in Kaqchikel, as in many other Mayan languages. More importantly, the results revealed that the preference for subject-object word order in sentence comprehension observed in previous studies may not be universal; rather, processing load in sentence comprehension is greatly affected by the syntactic nature of individual languages.
AB - The processing load of sentences with different word orders in the Kaqchikel Mayan language was investigated using event-related potentials. We observed a P600 for subject-verb-object and verb-subject-object sentences as compared to verb-object-subject (VOS) sentences, suggesting that VOS order is easier to process than the other orders. This is consistent with the traditional interpretation in Mayan linguistics that the syntactically determined basic word order is VOS in Kaqchikel, as in many other Mayan languages. More importantly, the results revealed that the preference for subject-object word order in sentence comprehension observed in previous studies may not be universal; rather, processing load in sentence comprehension is greatly affected by the syntactic nature of individual languages.
KW - Basic word order
KW - Guatemala
KW - field-based psycholinguistics
KW - processing load
KW - syntactic complexity
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U2 - 10.1080/23273798.2015.1080372
DO - 10.1080/23273798.2015.1080372
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84944674498
SN - 2327-3798
VL - 30
SP - 1209
EP - 1229
JO - Language, Cognition and Neuroscience
JF - Language, Cognition and Neuroscience
IS - 9
ER -