Role Of Word Order Research Articles

Intervention and amelioration effects in the acquisition of Spanish object relative clauses: the role of word order and DOM

Intervention and amelioration effects in the acquisition of Spanish object relative clauses: the role of word order and DOM

The distinct contributions of cause–effect order and reasoning type in judgments of causality

ABSTRACTPeople generally perceive a stronger link between smoking and cancer than between cancer and smoking. Generally, prior research on asymmetrical causal reasoning has not distinguished predictive (searching for effects) and diagnostic reasoning (searching for causes) from the order in which causes and effects are presented. Across 6 studies (overall N = 627), we show that order and reasoning have an additive influence on the causality perception: causes, spatially or temporally presented before the effect, strengthen the causality attribution associated to predictive (vs. diagnostic) frames. Moreover, we show that order and reasoning frame are bi-directionally related, as the cause-first order triggers predictive reasoning and vice versa, and people mentally maintain the cause-first order when envisaging a causal relation. Besides its methodological contribution to the causal reasoning literature, this research demonstrates the powerful role of word order in causal reasoning. Implications for the role of word order in communication and risk prevention are discussed.

The role of word order in bilingual speakers’ representation of their two languages: the case of Spanish–Kaqchikel bilinguals

When bilingual speakers plan to speak in one of their languages, the other language remains active and exerts an influence on the chosen language. However, the factors that modulate this influence, and particularly the extent to which syntactic structures and word order need to be the same in both languages for this influence to occur, are not yet fully understood. In this study, we explore the role of free word order in bilinguals’ representation of their two languages by analyzing the connections of linguistic representations in Spanish–Kaqchikel early bilinguals, two languages that allow word order variation in transitive sentences. In Experiment 1, a structural priming experiment within Kaqchikel was conducted with voice and word order of prime as independent variables. Results showed priming of both structure and word order, independently from each other. In Experiment 2, cross-linguistic structural priming was used from Spanish to Kaqchikel. Results showed priming of voice, regardless of word order, but not priming of word order. Taken together, these results suggest that, in languages with greater flexibility in their basic word orders, structural selection and word order choice seem to be independent processes.

Four- to five-year-olds’ use of word order and prosody in focus marking in Dutch

AbstractThis study investigated Dutch-speaking four- to five-year-olds’ use of word order and prosody in distinguishing focus types (broad focus, narrow focus, and contrastive narrow focus) via an interactive answer-reconstruction game. We have found an overall preference for the unmarked word order SVO and no evidence for the use of OVS to distinguish focus types. But the children used pitch and duration in the subject-nouns to distinguish focus types in SVO sentences. These findings show that Dutch-speaking four- to five-year-olds differ from their German- and Finnish-speaking peers, who show evidence of varying choice of word order to mark specific focus types, and use prosody to distinguish focus types in subject and object nouns in both SVO and OVS sentences. These comparisons suggest that typological differences in the relative importance between word order and prosody can lead to differences in children’s use of word order and prosody in unmarked and marked word orders. A more equal role of word order and prosody in the ambient language can stimulate more extensive use of prosody in the marked word order, whereas a more limited role of word order can restrict the use of prosody in the unmarked word order.

If it’s red, it’s not Vap: How competition among words may benefit early word learning

One of the most prominent issues in early cognitive and linguistic development concerns how children figure out meanings of words from hearing them in context, since in many contexts there are multiple words and multiple potential referents for those words. Recent findings concerning on-line sentence comprehension suggest that, within the conversational context, potential referents compete for mappings to words. Three experiments examined whether such competitive processes may play a role in young children's learning of novel adjectives in an artificial word learning task. According to a competitive process view, although young children often mismap adjectives to whole objects rather than the properties of objects, explicitly mentioned familiar words should strongly map to referents consistent with those words and thereby decrease the likelihood of novel words being mismapped to these referents. Experiments 1 and 2 examined the role of the mere mention of familiar words and the role of word order in two year olds' ability to map a novel adjective to a property. Experiment 3 examined these processes in three year olds. The results indicate that lexical competition plays a particularly strong role in helping two year olds map a novel object to a property, whereas syntactic information about form class may also be informative to older children. The results suggest how fundamental processes of lexical competition in on-line word comprehension may give young learners a way to leverage known words in learning new words.

Word-Order Variability and FSP in Written and Spoken Discourse

The article explores the role of word-order as an indicator of the rheme in samples of written and spoken language respectively. The assumption was that this role of wordorder would be more prominent in written language, where the choice of a particular linear arrangement may be prompted by the need to achieve the effect of end-focus. In spoken discourse the rheme is signalled by prosodic clues, namely by the placement of the intonation nucleus, irrespective of its position in the sentence, rendering word-order a secondary indicator. As a result, the frequency of deviations from the grammatical word-order, e.g. fronting, is lower in spoken discourse. However, the analysis of word-order in spoken discourse is made difficult by irregularity and structural incompleteness.

The Role of Word Order in the Interpretation of Canonical and Non-Canonical Graphic Symbol Utterances: A Developmental Study

Graphic symbols are often used to represent words in Augmentative and Alternative Communication systems. Previous findings suggest that different processes operate when using graphic symbols and when using speech. This study assessed the ability of native speakers of French with no communication disorders from four age groups to interpret graphic-symbol sequences of varying length and canonicity. Results reveal that, as they get older, participants show an increase in their capacity to interpret graphic-symbol sequences. Constituent order played an important role in the interpretation of the sequences. However, the specific word-order strategies used varied depending on the age group and the type of sequence presented.

The role of phonology in reading Japanese: Or why I don’t hear myself when reading Japanese

Based on the phenomenal experience that when I read Japanese I don't hear ‘inner speech’, I suggest that the role of phonology may be more limited when reading text in Japanese than in English. Although this possibility has been suggested by others, I argue for somewhat different sources of this reduced role. Specifically, I propose that the greater visual discriminability of kanji words under degraded conditions, and the less important role of word order as a syntactic cue are likely to be the key factors. Relevant literature is reviewed, and directions for future research are suggested.

Processing A Language without Inflections: A Reaction Time Study of Sentence Interpretation in Chinese

Chinese is well-known for its impoverished system of grammatical morphology. This study examines how, in the absence of inflections, Chinese speakers employ other types of cues in real-time sentence interpretation. A reaction time technique was designed to tap into the role of word order, noun animacy, the object marker ba, the passive marker bei, and the indefinite marker yi. Results show the following hierarchy of cue strengths in Chinese: passive marker bei > animacy > word order > object marker ba > indefinite marker yi. The fact that the semimorphological markers (ba and bei) are intercepted by semantic (noun animacy) and syntactic (word order) cues in this strength hierarchy shows that cues are not necessarily grouped together by linguistic type (e.g., morphology > order vs order > morphology). Complex interactions among cue types were observed in both the decision and the reaction time data, reflecting principles of competition and convergence. These findings are compatible with interactive activation models of sentence processing (e.g., the Competition Model), while posing problems for models that assume a modular architecture in which morphological, semantic, and syntactic sources of information are insulated from one another at various points in parsing and interpretation. Finally, reaction time data reveal aspects of processing that are often not available in results from choice response measures, attesting to the usefulness of reaction time studies at the sentence level.

The Role of Word Order in Syntactic Change: Sentence-Final Prominency in Korean Negation

Proceedings of the 3rd Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (1977), pp. 670-684

The psychological subject and predicate

The present study is a demonstration of the independence of the psychological subject-predicate (topic-comment) distinction from the notions of grammatical and logical subject and predicate. Two hundred and eighty college students were given the task of selecting one of two pictures to go with a sentence in an ambiguous situation. The ambiguity was created by the fact that neither picture actually represented the content of the sentence; however, one picture or the other will be selected depending on which aspect of the sentence (the agent or the object) is selected as the psychological subject. The results clearly indicate that the psychological subject and predicate cannot be equated with the logical subject and predicate. Although the results for some sentence types can be accounted for by the role of word order, it is clear that the superficial subject is not consistently selected as the psychological subject. These results are a partial confirmation of the Prague School approach to the notion of topic and comment, in which this distinction involves a separate level of analysis from the logical or grammatical organization of the sentence.

On the Syntactic Role of Word Order and of Prosodic Features

On the Syntactic Role of Word Order and of Prosodic Features