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 TP S [ VP 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, [ TP S [ VP t1 V O1] ] for SVO and [ TP t1 [ VP O V ] S1 ] 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, [ TP’ O1 [ TP S [ VP t1 V ] ] ] for OSV, [ TP’ V1 [ TP S [ VP O t1] ] ] for VSO, and double word order alternations take place within the same level as [ TP t1 [ VP t2 V O2 ] S1] 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.
Highlights
The Sinhalese language belongs to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages, spoken by approximately 13 million people as their mother tongue in the country of Sri Lanka (Englebretson & Genetti, 2005)
The present study proposed a processing model for Sinhalese sentences in the spoken form as follows
This study reported here was partially supported by Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research from the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology
Summary
The Sinhalese language belongs to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages, spoken by approximately 13 million people as their mother tongue in the country of Sri Lanka (Englebretson & Genetti, 2005). English is an official language as defined by the constitution in Sri Lanka. The written and spoken forms differ noticeably in their core grammatical structures (Chandralal, 2010; Englebretson & Genetti, 2005; Miyagishi, 2005; Noguchi, 1984). The written form is mostly used for reading news on TV or radio, and for making public speeches (Miyagishi, 2005), as well as for printed materials. The spoken form is very flexible in various syntactic aspects whereas the written form involves many strict grammatical rules
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