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

ABSTRACT

The word order that is easiest to understand in a language generally coincides with the word order most frequently used in that language. In Kaqchikel, however, there is a discrepancy between the two: the syntactically basic VOS incurs the least cognitive load, whereas SVO is most frequently employed. This suggests that processing load is primarily determined by grammatical processes, whereas word order selection is affected by additional conceptual factors. Thus, the agent could be conceptually more salient than other elements even for Kaqchikel speakers. This hypothesis leads us to the following expectations: (1) utterance latency should be shorter for SVO sentences than for VOS sentences; (2) Kaqchikel speakers should pay more attention to agents than to other elements during sentence production; and (3) despite these, the cognitive load during sentence production should be higher for SVO than for VOS. A Kaqchikel sentence production experiment confirmed all three expectations.

KEYWORDS:

• Word order preference
• processing load
• sentence production
• utterance latency
• VOS language

Acknowledgment

Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the 68th Meeting of the Tohoku Psychological Association (Akita University, Japan) and the 53rd Meeting of the Korean Society for Cognitive and Biological Psychology (Jeju Island, Republic of Korea) as well as MIT and Harvard University. We are grateful to the participants and audience for their feedback and to two anonymous reviewers for their insightful and instructive comments on an earlier draft. We also thank Juan Esteban Ajsivinac Sian, Filiberto Patal Majzul, Lolmay Pedro Oscar García Matzar, and Yoshiho Yasugi for their invaluable support of the current study throughout its various stages. This work was supported in part by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Numbers 15H02603, 19H05589.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Masatoshi Koizumi http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0719-7128

Notes

1 The syntactically basic word order of a language is defined here as the word order associated with the simplest syntactic structures among grammatically possible transitive sentences with a nominal subject and a nominal object in that language. In Japanese, for instance, the syntactically basic word order is SOV, and OSV is derived from it by scrambling the object across the subject. OSV sentences are, therefore, syntactically more complex than are comparable SOV sentences, as schematically shown in (i). In (ib) the fronted object and the gap in the object position forms a filler-gap dependency, which is lacking in (ia).

1. [SOV]

2. [O_i [S gap_i V]]

2 The first two factors mentioned below are in line with the general idea of availability-based models of sentence production, according to which speakers favour sentence structures in which more readily available words are placed earlier. In contrast, efficiency-based theories focus more on ease of comprehension. See Ros, Santesteban, Fukumura, and Laka (2015) for a review. See also Koizumi et al. (2014) for the related notions of the universal cognitive view vs. the individual grammar view. Koizumi et al. (2014) argue that the cognitive load during sentence comprehension is primarily determined by grammatical processes operating on linguistic representations (in congruent with the individual grammar view), whereas word order selection in sentence production more faithfully reflects event apprehension and preverbal message construction at the stage of conceptual processing (consistent with the universal cognition view).

3 The categories of utterances excluded from analysis and their ratios in each of the SVO and VOS conditions are as follows: transitive sentences in a word order other than the specified one (SVO = 2.69 ± 3.30%, VOS = 8.08 ± 13.77%, p = .21), intransitive sentences (SVO = 6.15 ± 4.16%, VOS = 6.54 ± 6.25%, p = .75), adjectival sentences (SVO = 11.92 ± 12.00%, VOS = 9.23 ± 7.87%, p = .25), passive sentences (SVO = 0.38 ± 1.39%, VOS = 2.69 ± 8.32%, p = .35), antipassive sentences (SVO = 1.92 ± 3.84%, VOS = 4.23 ± 7.32%, p = .19), and others (SVO = 2.31 ± 3.88%, VOS = 1.92 ± 3.25%, p = .67). The removed responses were equally distributed between the two word order conditions, and there was no significant difference in each category as shown above nor in total (SVO = 25.38 ± 12.33%, VOS = 32.69 ± 16.28%, p = .19).

4 The activated channel (channel 29) in this study and the one (channel 32) reported in Takeshima et al. (2014) are adjacent to each other. Although they are not the same, given the relatively low spatial resolution and rough spatial correspondence of the NIRS system, compared to the magnetic resonance imaging system (Strangman, Culver, Thompson, & Boas, 2002), it is reasonable to conclude that similar brain regions (i.e., regions in the left IFG) activated in our current and previous studies. Note that some previous studies have analyzed NIRS signals by combining multi-channels responses together and have interpreted global brain activities (e.g., Minagawa-Kawai, Mori, Furuya, Hayashi, & Sato, 2002; Minagawa-Kawai, Mori, Sato, & Koizumi, 2004). It is beyond the scope of the present study to identify the precise locus of activation.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported in part by Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) KAKENHI [grant numbers 15H02603, 19H05589].