Effects of Word Order Alternation on the Sentence Processing of Sinhalese Written and Spoken Forms

Abstract

In both written and spoken forms, the Sinhalese language allows all six possible word orders for active sentences with transitive verbs (i.e., SOV, OSV, SVO, OVS, VSO, and VOS), even though its unmarked order is subject-object-verb (SOV) (e.g., Gair, 1998; Miyagishi, 2003; Yamamoto, 2003). Reaction times for sentence correctness decisions showed SOV < SVO = OVS = OSV = VSO = VOS for the written form, and SOV < SVO = OVS < OSV = VSO = VOS for the spoken form. The different degrees of reaction times may correspond to the three different types of word order alternation. First, the fastest reaction time for SOV word order corresponds to the canonical order SOV without any structural change, represented as [<sub> TP </sub> S [<sub> VP </sub> O V] ] for both the written and spoken forms. Second, word order alternation at the same structural level is involved in both SVO and OVS, [<sub> TP </sub> S [<sub> VP </sub> t<sub>1</sub> V O<sub>1</sub>] ] for SVO and [<sub> TP </sub> t<sub>1</sub> [<sub> VP </sub> O V ] S<sub>1</sub> ] for OVS, resulting in a slower reaction speed than SOV. Third, and again for only the spoken form, word order alternation takes place at a different structural level, [<sub> TP’ </sub> O<sub>1</sub> [<sub> TP </sub> S [<sub> VP </sub> t<sub>1</sub> V ] ] ] for OSV, [<sub> TP’ </sub> V<sub>1</sub> [<sub> TP </sub> S [<sub> VP </sub> O t<sub>1</sub>] ] ] for VSO, and double word order alternations take place within the same level as [<sub> TP </sub> t<sub>1</sub> [<sub> VP </sub> t<sub>2</sub> V O<sub>2</sub> ] S<sub>1</sub>] for VOS. These word order alternations for OSV, VSO and VOS require an extra cognitive load for sentence processing, even heavier than for a single word order alternation of SVO and OVS taking place at the same structural level. The present study thus provided evidence that the speed of sentence processing can be predicted from the cognitive load involved in word order alternation in a configurational phrase structure

Priority Information Determining the Canonical Word Order of Written Sinhalese Sentences

“…The results of Experiments 1 and 2 provided evidence for scrambling effects in written Sinhalese. Thus, as previous studies (Dissanayaka, 2007;Herath, Hyodo, Kawada, Ikeda, & Herath, 1994;Pallatthara & Weihene, 1966;Tamaoka et al, 2011) indicated, both experiments in the present study also showed that the canonical word order in the Sinhalese language is SOV.…”

“…Furthermore, previous studies on the Sinhalese language (e.g., Dissanayaka, 2007;Gair, 1998;Miyagishi, 2003) suggest that the flexibility of Sinhalese word order allows sentences to have another five different word orders as OSV, OVS, SVO, VSO, and VOS which also represent the same meaning of that SOV ordered sentence. Tamaoka, Kanduboda, & Sakai (2011) conducted experiments using all these orders. They found that, among them, SOV is the fastest to be processed by native Sinhalese speakers, and concluded that SOV is the canonical order from the psycholinguistic perspective.…”

Linguistic and individual factors in meaning comprehension

“…This is consistent with an incremental processing system that bears predictive mechanisms: the processor makes predictions on the upcoming words based on the input information received by far. Since Japanese has an explicit case-marking system, it is likely that the processor takes advantages of the case markers during real-time comprehension (Kahraman et al, 2010;Kamide et al, 2003;Miyamoto, 2002Miyamoto, , 2003Tamaoka et al, 2005Tamaoka et al, , 2011Sato et al, 2009;Yamashita, 1997Yamashita, , 2000. Specifically, in our transitive sentences, the critical verbs were preceded by an object NP that carried an accusative case marker -o (ACC).…”

Cognitive loads and time courses related to word order preference in Kaqchikel sentence production: an NIRS and eye-tracking study

“…Japanese employs SOV and OSV; all the six logically possible orders are actually used in Finnish; and so on. It has been observed, in many flexible as well as rigid word order languages, that the syntactically basic word order is easier to process than the other grammatically possible word orders (derived word orders) (Bader & Meng, 1999 for German, Kaiser & Trueswell, 2004 for Finnish, Kim, 2012 for Korean, Mazuka, Itoh, &Kondo, 2002 andTamaoka et al, 2005 for Japanese, Sekerina, 1997 for Russian, Tamaoka, Kanduboda, & Sakai, 2011 for Sinhalese). 1 In Japanese, for example, sentences with the syntactically basic SOV order are processed faster than comparable OSV sentences according to various psycholinguistic studies using sentence plausibility judgment tasks (Chujo, 1983;Tamaoka et al, 2005), self-paced reading (Koizumi & Imamura, 2017;Shibata et al, 2006), and eye tracking (Mazuka et al, 2002;Tamaoka et al, 2005).…”