Chapter 7 turns our attention to basic word order in language and natural order of thought. In his seminal work, Greenberg (1963) observed that a vast majority of the world’s languages have one of the SO word orders as their basic word order. It is interesting to note that the distribution is heavily biased even among the three SO orders, with SOV being the most frequent, which indicates that SOV has some special status among the six possible word orders in some sense. Why should this be the case? To address this question, Goldin-Meadow et al. (2008) showed short animations depicting transitive events (e.g., a girl twisting a knob) to speakers of four languages (Chinese, English, Spanish [all SVO], and Turkish [SOV]). The participants were then asked to describe the depicted events by using only their hands, i.e., with gestures. The speakers of all four languages dominantly used the agent–patient–action order in their gestures, regardless of the basic word order of their languages. Goldin-Meadow et al. (2008: 9167) took these results to suggest that the agent–patient–action order reflects the natural sequencing of an event representation and that developing languages use it as the default pattern, thus displaying an SOV word order.

Although previous studies in gesture production have claimed that the agent–patient order is the universal preference when humans think about events and describe them nonverbally, the studies have only assessed languages in which the subject precedes the object in the basic word order (i.e., SO languages). Such limited evidence is not sufficient to conclude that all humans universally perceive the world in the agent–patient order, and it cannot help us disentangle whether the apparent preference for agent–patient sequences is the result of universal cognitive factors or the influence of the word order of SO languages. To disentangle these two possibilities (i.e., the UCV and the IGV), it is crucial to examine a language in which the object precedes the subject in the basic word order. Chapter 8 reports on a gesture production experiment we conducted with Kaqchikel speakers similar to Goldin-Meadow et al. (2008), finding that Kaqchikel speakers dominantly produced agent–patient gestures. Therefore, agent–patient ordering does seem to be a universal preference for event description, which is in line with the UCV as well as the results of previous studies.