In many flexible word order languages, sentences with a transitive verb (V) in which the subject (S) precedes the object (O) (SO word order = SOV, SVO, VSO) are reported to be “preferred” over those in which the opposite occurs (OS word order= OSV, OVS, VOS). For example, SO sentences are easier to process and are produced more frequently than OS sentences in Finnish, Japanese, Sinhalese, and others. This empirical evidence of the preference for SO word order, however, is not conclusive, because it comes exclusively from SO languages (i.e., languages in which SO is the syntactically simplest word order). It is therefore necessary to study OS languages (i.e., languages in which OS is the syntactically simplest word order) to investigate whether the same preference holds. This book reports on several experiments we have conducted, to this end, on Kaqchikel (Mayan, Guatemala) and Seediq (Austronesian, Taiwan), whose syntactically basic word order is VOS.

Chapter 3 reports behavioral experiments with a sentence plausibility judgment task in Kaqchikel to test predictions by the Individual Grammar View and the Universal Cognition View. In this task, Kaqchikel sentences in one of the three commonly used orders (VOS, SVO, and VOS) were presented in a random order to participants through headsets. The participants were asked to judge whether each sentence was semantically plausible and to push a YES button for correct sentences or a NO button for incorrect sentences as quickly and accurately as possible. The time from the beginning of each stimulus sentence until a button was pressed was measured as the reaction time. Semantically natural sentences were processed faster in the VOS order than in the SVO or VSO orders, which suggests that VOS is easier to process than SVO or VSO. These results are compatible with the prediction of the IGV, but not with the prediction of the UCV, showing that the SO preference in sentence comprehension is not fully grounded in the universal properties of human cognition; rather, processing preference may be language-specific to some extent, reflecting syntactic differences in individual languages.