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Traditionally, due to the availability of technology, psycholinguistic research has focused mainly on Western languages. However, this focus has recently shifted towards a more diverse range of languages, whose structures often throw into question many previous assumptions in syntactic theory and language processing. Based on a case study in field-based comparative psycholinguistics, this pioneering book is the first to explore the neurocognition of endangered 'object-before-subject' languages, such as Kaqchikel and Seediq. It draws on a range of methods - including linguistic fieldwork, theoretical linguistic analysis, corpus research, questionnaire surveys, behavioural experiments, eye tracking, event-related brain potentials, functional magnetic resonance imaging, and near-infrared spectroscopy – to consider preferred constituent orders in both language and thought, examining comprehension as well as production. In doing so, it highlights the importance of field-based cross-linguistic cognitive neuroscientific research in uncovering universal and language-particular aspects of the human language faculty, and the interaction between language and thought.
Chapter 2 sketches aspects of the grammar of Kaqchikel relevant to the discussions in the subsequent chapters. Kaqchikel is a Mayan language spoken in Guatemala. It is a head-marking and morphologically ergative language in which subjects and objects are not overtly case-marked for grammatical relations. Rather, grammatical relations are obligatorily marked on predicates, e.g., a verb with two sets of agreement morphemes, one set for a transitive subject and another for a transitive object and an intransitive subject. The word order of Kaqchikel is relatively flexible, and all of the logically possible six word orders are grammatically allowed. Among these, VOS is considered the basic word order of Kaqchikel by many Mayan language researchers.
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