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Title and subtitle:
On the (non-)universality of the preference for subject-object word order in sentencecomprehension: A sentence processing study in Kaqchikel Maya
Authors’ names and affiliations:
Masatoshi Koizumi
Yoshiho Yasugi
Katsuo Tamaoka
Sachiko Kiyama
Jungho Kim
Juan Esteban Ajsivinac Sian
Lolmay Pedro Oscar García Mátzar

Tohoku University
National Museum of Ethnology
Nagoya University
National Center for Geriatrics and Gerontology
Tohoku University
Comunidad Lingüística Kaqchikel
Comunidad Lingüística Kaqchikel

Authors’ e-mail addresses:
Koizumikoizumi@sal.tohoku.ac.jp
Yasugiyasugi@idc.minpaku.ac.jp
Tamaokaktamaoka@lang.nagoya-u.ac.jp
Kiyamaskiyama@ncgg.go.jp
Kimkjungho7@gmail.com
Ajsivinac Sianajtzibsyan@yahoo.com
García Mátzar
lolmay07@gmail.com

First author’s mailing address:
Masatoshi Koizumi
Department of Linguistics
Tohoku University27-1 Kawauchi Aoba-ku
Sendai 980-8576
JAPANkoizumi@sal.tohoku.ac.jp

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On the (non-)universality of the preference for subject-object word order in sentencecomprehension: A sentence processing study in Kaqchikel Maya

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Abstract:
The processing load of sentences with three different word orders (i.e. VOS, VSO, and SVO) in
Kaqchikel Maya was investigated using a sentence plausibility judgment task. The results
showed that VOS sentences were processed faster than VSO and SVO sentences. Thisconfirmed the traditional analysis in Mayan linguistics that the syntactically determined basic
word order is VOS in Kaqchikel, as in many other Mayan languages. More importantly, theresult revealed that the preference for subject-object word order in sentence comprehension
observed in previous studies is not universal; rather, processing load in sentence comprehension
is greatly affected by the syntactic nature of individual languages.** The present study, at its various developmental stages, has been presented at the 24th Annual
CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, the 10th meeting of the Kansai Circle of
Psycholinguistics, the 145th Meeting of the Linguistic Society of Japan, the eighth Workshop on
Altaic Formal Linguistics, the second Formal Approaches to Mayan Linguistics, and the sixth
Formal Approaches to Japanese Linguistics, as well as at the ZAS (Centre for General
Linguistics, Berlin), MIT, Mie University, Hokkaido University, and Kwansei Gakuin University.
We would like to thank the audiences for their helpful comments and encouragement, especially
Judith Aissen, Noam Chomsky, Jessica Coon, Nora England, John Haviland, Robert Henderson,
Klaus von Heusinger, James Huang, Sabine Iatridou, Jaklin Kornfilt, Alec Marantz, Shigeru
Miyagawa, Wayne O’Neil, Umut Özge, David Pesetsky, Colin Phillips, Uli Sauerland, Peter
Sells, Shigeo Tonoike, Hubert Truckenbrodt, Tasaku Tsunoda, Kenneth Wexler, John Whitman,
and Kazuko Yatsushiro. Part of this work was supported by a Grant-in-Aid for Scientific
Research (S) entitled “A field-based cognitive neuroscientific study of the processing of
OS-type languages” (No. 22222001 to MK) from the Japan Society for the Promotion of
Science.

Keywords: basic word order, field-based psycholinguistics, Guatemala, processing load,syntactic complexity

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On the (non-)universality of the preference for subject-object word order in sentencecomprehension: A sentence processing study in Kaqchikel Maya
1. INTRODUCTION
It is known that in many flexible word order languages, including Basque, Finnish,
German, Japanese, Korean, Russian, and Sinhalese, sentences in which the subject (S) precedes
the object (O) (SO WORD ORDER = SOV, SVO, VSO) induce a lower processing load incomprehension than those in which the opposite occurs (OS WORD ORDER = OSV, OVS, VOS),and thus, they are preferred by speakers (Sekerina 1997, Bader and Meng 1999, Mazuka, Itoh,and Kondo 2002, Kaiser and Trueswell 2004, Tamaoka et al. 2005, among many others).
However, previous studies on sentence processing have all targeted languages, such as Finnish,in which the subject precedes the object in the syntactically basic word order (= SOLANGUAGES). Hence, it remains unclear whether the preference for SO is a reflection of word
order in individual languages or human cognitive features that are more universal. What werefer to as INDIVIDUAL GRAMMAR THEORY in this paper posits that a language’s syntacticallydetermined basic word order has a low processing load in comparison to other possible word
orders, whereas what may be referred to as UNIVERSAL COGNITION THEORY hypothesizes that SO
word order has a low processing load regardless of the basic word order of any individual
language. To verify which of these two theories is correct, it is necessary to examine languages
in which the object precedes the subject in the syntactically basic word order (= OSLANGUAGES), for which the two theories develop different predictions. Therefore, as described
below, we conducted a sentence processing experiment in Kaqchikel, a Mayan language spoken
in Guatemala. The syntactically determined basic word order of Kaqchikel is VOS, although in
general, word order is relatively flexible (García Matzar and Rodríguez Guaján 1997: 333). The
results of the experiment revealed that for Kaqchikel speakers, the processing load of VOS islower than that of the two other commonly used word orders, i.e. VSO and SVO. This suggeststhat the preference for SO in sentence comprehension is not universal; rather, syntactic featuresof individual languages significantly influence sentence processing load.
2. SO WORD ORDER PREFERENCE
Evidence that SO word orders are easier to process than OS word orders in flexible word
order languages is abundant in psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic literature. In terms of
behavioral indices, Japanese readers take less time to judge whether a sentence makes sensewhen it has SOV word order than when it has OSV word order (Tamaoka et al. 2005). Longer
reading times for OSV sentences in Japanese were also reported using self-paced reading andeye-tracking methodologies (Mazuka, Itoh, and Kondo 2002, Imamura and Koizumi 2008b).
Similarly, in Finnish, the SVO order is processed faster than OVS order even when an
appropriate context is provided for the latter (Kaiser and Trueswell 2004). Parallel results from4

the processing of orthographically and phonologically presented sentences have been reported
for many other languages (see Sekerina 1997 for Russian, Tamaoka et al. 2011 for Sinhalese,
Kim 2012 for Korean, among many others). In terms of neurophysiological indices, studies withfunctional magnetic resonance imaging have found that the left inferior frontal gyrus is more
activated during the processing of OS word orders compared to SO word orders (Grewe et al.
2007 for German, Kinno et al. 2008 and Kim et al. 2009 for Japanese). Research on
event-related brain potentials also supports the claim that SO word orders are easier to process:Compared with SO orders, OS orders elicit P600 and/or (sustained) Anterior Negativity
components, suggesting that processing OS word orders places a larger load on the working
memory (Roesler et al. 1998 for German, Ueno and Kluender 2003 and Hagiwara et al. 2007 forJapanese, Erdocia et al. 2009 for Basque).
The SO word order preference has been observed not only for flexible word orderlanguages but also for languages with less flexible word order, such as English and Hebrew. For
example, in English, subject relative clauses such as The reporter [who sent the photographer tothe editor] hoped for a good story are easier to process than object relative clauses such as The
reporter [who the photographer sent to the editor] hoped for a good story, as evidenced by bothbehavioral and neurophysiological indices (Caplan and Waters 1999, Just and Carpenter 2001,
Grodner and Gibson 2005, Santi and Grodzinsky 2010).
Thus, we seem to have solid evidence that SO word orders are preferred to OS word
orders in many languages of the world. The question then arises as to the sources of thispreference in sentence comprehension. A possibility that immediately comes to mind is that it isprimarily due to syntactic canonicity (i.e. individual grammar theory). According to many
sentence processing theories, including Pritchett and Whitman’s (1995) Representational Theoryof Complexity, Gibson’s (2000) Dependency Locality Theory, and Hawkins’ (2000) Early
Immediate Constituents, other things being equal, a language’s syntactically determined basic
word order is easier to process than other grammatically possible but noncanonical derived word
orders in the language. Thus, in the individual grammar theory, SO word orders were preferredin previous studies because they are the syntactically basic word orders in the target languages.
Alternatively, the SO word order preference in sentence comprehension may be largely
attributable to human cognitive features that are more universal (i.e. universal cognition theory).
That there may be such features is strongly suggested by the fact that a vast majority of theworld’s languages have one of the SO word orders as the basic word order (SOV 48%, SVO
41%, VSO 8%, VOS 2%, OVS 1%, and OSV 0.5%, according to Dryer 2005). 1 In particular, anumber of studies have shown that entities that are prominent as a result of properties such asagency, animacy, concreteness, prototypicality, and prior mention in the discourse tend to appear
as sentence-initial subjects (cf. Slobin and Bever 1982, Bock and Warren 1985, Hirsh-Pasek and
Golinkoff 1996, Primus 1999, Branigan, Pickering, and Tanaka 2008, Bornkessel-Schlesewsky
and Schlesewsky 2009). The universal cognition theory, therefore, leads to the expectation that5

SO word order has a low processing load regardless of the basic word order of any individual
language, again consistent with what has been reported in the literature so far.
Both the individual grammar theory and universal cognition theory correctly predict the
SO word order preference in sentence comprehension in SO languages. However, theirpredictions diverge when it comes to OS languages. According to the individual grammar theory,
OS word orders should be processed faster than SO word orders in these languages. However,the universal cognition theory predicts that the opposite should be the case. It is therefore
necessary to study OS languages to determine which theory is on the right track. We thus turn toan OS language, Kaqchikel, in Section 3.
3. KAQCHIKEL
Kaqchikel is one of the 21 Mayan languages spoken in Guatemala. It is mainly used in thehighlands west of Guatemala City, the capital. With over 450,000 speakers, it is one of theprincipal Mayan languages along with K’iche’, Q’eqchi’, and Mam (Tay Coyoy 1996: 55,
Brown, Maxwell, and Little 2006: 2, Lewis 2009).
Like other Mayan languages, Kaqchikel is head-marking: Subjects and objects areunmarked, and person and number agreement for both subjects and objects are obligatorily
expressed on the verb. Kaqchikel is ergative, like other Mayan languages. In Mayan linguistics,
ergative agreement markers (i.e. those that indicate the subject of a transitive verb) are called Set
A, and absolutive agreement markers (which indicate either the subject of an intransitive verb or
object of a transitive verb) are known as Set B. The order of morphemes in the verb is[Aspect-B-A-Verb stem]. 2 An example is given in (1) below.
(1)Y-e’-in-to’
IC-B3pl-A1sg-help‘I help them.’

Since Kaqchikel is a pro-drop language, (1) functions as both independent speech and an
independent sentence.
Like its ancestor language, Kaqchikel’s syntactically determined basic word order is VOS,
but SVO and VSO are also possible (Rodríguez Guaján 1994: 200, García Matzar andRodríguez Guaján 1997: 333, Tichoc Cumes et al. 2000: 195, Ajsivinac Sian et al. 2004: 162). 3
According to England (1991), these word orders are derived from VOS through reordering rules,
as schematically shown in (2). 4
(2)

Order
VOS
VSO

Derivation
[VOS]
[[V
S]

REORDERED O]

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SVO

[REORDERED S [VO]]Aissen (1992) has proposed more elaborate syntactic structures for Mayan sentences with theseword orders, but her analysis agrees with England’s that VSO and SVO word orders areassociated with more complex syntactic structures than VOS word order (see also Coon 2010
and Preminger 2011).
Given this feature, the following predictions can be made about processing load in thecomprehension of Kaqchikel sentences: If the preference for SO word order shown by speakers
of SO languages is mainly caused by the syntactic structure of the individual language, assuggested by the individual grammar theory, VOS sentences should have a lower processing
load than VSO or SVO sentences in Kaqchikel. On the other hand, if SO triggers a lower
processing load than OS regardless of the basic word order of the individual grammar, assuggested by the universal cognition theory, then Kaqchikel VOS sentences should create agreater processing load than the other two word orders. The field-based psycholinguistic study
described in Section 4 tested these predictions.
It should be noted at this point that, even though Kaqchikel has VOS as its syntacticallybasic word order, it is the SVO order that is most frequently used in this language (England
1991: 472, Rodríguez Guaján 1994: 201, Maxwell and Little 2006: 102, Kubo et al. 2012).
According to Kubo et al. (2012), for example, of all the sentences with a transitive verb andnominal subject and object produced in their sentence production experiment with a picture
description task, sentences with the SVO, VOS, and VSO order constitute 74.4%, 24.2%, and
1.4%, respectively. In fact, not only in Kaqchikel, but also in many Mayan languages, word
orders in which subjects are preposed appear more frequently than the syntactically determinedbasic word order. Therefore, it has been pointed out that “syntactically determined word order”
from the standpoint of syntactic complexity needs to be distinguished from “pragmaticallydetermined word order,” commonly used for pragmatic purposes, when examining the “basic
word order” of Mayan languages (Broady 1984, England 1991). In psycholinguistic literature, it
has been reported that there are cases where the frequency at which the words and sentence
structures appear affects the sentence processing load (e.g. Trueswell, Tanenhaus, and Kello
1993). That is, speakers of the language are more proficient in sentence structures and words
that are used frequently, and they are more likely to process these with speed and accuracy. It isthus interesting to observe how the production frequency influences sentence processing in
Kaqchikel. We will return to this issue in Section 5.
4. EXPERIMENT
4.1 PARTICIPANTS
Sixty-one native speakers (29 females, 32 males) of Kaqchikel participated in theexperiment, which was carried out in Guatemala. The place of origin and residence of the7participants were distributed evenly throughout a wide range of central Guatemala highlands,
without any concentration on a particular region. As there is considerable dialectal and idiolectal
variation among Kaqchikel speakers, only the data of 22 speakers (10 females, 12 males) who
had over 80% accuracy for the sentence processing (of the 36 target items and 36 implausible
items to be explained in Section 4.2) were used in the final analysis. The speakers ranged in age
from 20 to 62 years. The average age was 36 years, 5 months with a standard deviation of 13
years, 4 months. 5
4.2 STIMULI
Semantically natural, grammatical transitive sentences were arranged into each of threeword orders (VOS, VSO, SVO), as shown in (3). Thirty-six sets, for a total of 108 target
sentences, were created in this way. 6 All the target sentences were so-called non-reversible
sentences, with a definite animate subject, definite inanimate object, and action verb.
(3)

a.

(VOS)

b.
c.

(VSO)
(SVO)

X-Ø-u-chöyrichäj
CP-B3sg-A3sg-cut
DET pine.tree‘The carpenter cut the pine tree.’
Xuchöyri ajanelri chäj
Ri ajanelxuchöyri chäj

ri
ajanel
DET carpenter

Additionally, 36 transitive sentences that were grammatical but not semantically natural werearranged in each of the three word orders. They were semantically implausible mostly due to aselectional restriction violation (e.g. #Xuch’äj ri kaq’ïq’ ri xta Selfa. ‘Miss Selfa washed theair.’). The total of 72 sets, consisting of 216 sentences, were counterbalanced and thencategorized into three groups according to word order. Further, 60 filler sentences were added toeach group. The sentences were recorded by a male native Kaqchikel speaker. The length oftime duration of each sentence was edited in Praat ver. 5.1.31 to make an equal duration acrossthe three word order conditions by slightly shortening the duration of some pauses between
phrases. No particular order was edited significantly more heavily than the others. After theediting, all the test items were judged as natural in terms of prosody by our native Kaqchikel
consultants. The averages and standard deviations of time duration for word order were as
follows: M = 3,002 ms, SD = 469 ms for VOS, M = 3,006 ms, SD = 468 ms for SVO, and M =3,001 ms, SD = 470 ms for VSO. 7 A one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) showed nosignificant differences among the word orders in terms of time duration between the onset andoffset of the sentence [F(2, 70) = 0.527, p = .592, ns.].
4.3 METHOD
A sentence plausibility judgment task (e.g. Caplan, Chen, and Waters 2008) was8administered using E-prime ver.2.0 (Psychology Software Tools). In this task, the stimulus
sentences were presented in a random order to the participants through headsets. The
participants were asked to judge whether each sentence was semantically plausible and to push a
YES button (correct sentence) or NO button (incorrect sentence) as quickly and accurately as
possible. The time from the beginning of each stimulus sentence until the button was pressed
was measured as the reaction time.
4.4 DATA COMPILATION FOR ANALYSIS
Among the 36 sets of semantically plausible transitive sentences, only correctly judged
items were analyzed. Answers that were given too quickly (500 ms and under) or too slowly(8000 ms and over) were recorded as missing values. Then, reaction times outside of 2.5
standard deviations at both the high and low ranges were replaced by boundaries indicated atplus and minus 2.5 standard deviations from the individual mean of each participant in eachcategory. These procedures resulted in the loss of 0.3% of the data. The means and standard
deviations of reaction times and error rates for the 36 sets of semantically plausible sentences inthe three word orders are reported in Table 1.
<INSERT TABLE 1 ABOUT HERE>
4.5 STATISTICAL ANALYSIS
Statistical analyses were conducted on the basis of a linear mixed effects (LME) model(e.g. Baayen, 2008), which estimates the effects of fixed variables that are of interest in the
study over random effects that can be assumed as being randomly sampled from the population.
In this study, we assumed the word order of Kaqchikel sentences as a fixed variable, andparticipant and item (i.e. stimuli sentence) as random variables. PASW ver. 18.0J was used to
conduct the analysis.
4.6 RESULTS
An ANOVA of reaction times using an LME model showed a significant main effect ofword order [F(2, 401.854) = 5.917, p < .01, ηp2 = .029]. Multiple comparisons by the Bonferroni
method revealed that VOS (M = 3,403 ms) was processed significantly faster than SVO (M =3,559 ms) [p < .05] and VSO (M = 3,601 ms) [p < .01]. No significant difference was foundbetween SVO and VSO.
An LME ANOVA of error rates revealed a significant main effect of word order [F(2,787.001) = 15.169, p < .001, ηp2 = .037]. Results of the post-hoc test showed that no significant
difference was observed between the error rates for VOS (M = 10.61%) and SVO (M = 7.58%),
whereas the error rate for VSO (M = 22.90%) was significantly higher than those for VOS [p< .001] and SVO [p < .001].

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5. DISCUSSION
The results of the sentence processing experiment in Kaqchikel showed that VOS word
order induced a lower processing load than the two SO word orders (SVO and VSO) for
sentences presented in isolation. This confirms the traditional analysis in Mayan linguistics that
VOS is the syntactically basic word order of Kaqchikel (García Matzar and Rodríguez Guaján
1997: 333). More importantly, it is consistent with the prediction of the individual grammar
theory and contradicts the prediction of the universal cognition theory. In other words, thepreference for SO word order in sentence comprehension reported in previous studies on SO
languages is not universal. This study verifies for the first time that for speakers of OS
languages, OS word order has a lower processing load. This finding does not deny the existenceof universal reasons for the preference for SO, but it certainly demonstrates that grammaticalfactors of individual languages have a relatively greater influence on sentence processing load. 8
In the individual grammar theory, there are three major factors that are generally
considered to contribute to the lower processing load of syntactically basic word orders
compared to other grammatically possible word orders: syntactic complexity,
discourse-pragmatic requirements, and production frequency. First, the syntactically basic word
order in a language, by definition, is associated with simpler syntactic structures than the othergrammatically possible orders in that language. It is therefore less demanding in terms ofworking memory load, and hence is easier to process. Second, the syntactically basic order can
be felicitously used in a wide range of contexts including the absence of any substantial context,
whereas derived orders require a specific discourse context to be felicitous. 9 For this reason,
derived orders cause a higher processing load when their discourse-pragmatic requirements are
not met, e.g. when presented out of context, as is the case in many processing experiments,
including that of the present study (see Kaiser and Trueswell 2004 and Weskott et al. 2011,
among many others). Finally, the syntactically basic order tends to be more frequently used thanother orders. 10 Since, other things being equal, more frequently used structures are processed
faster and more accurately, the basic word order tends to be easier to process. In Japanese, forinstance, sentences with the syntactically basic word order, i.e. SOV, have simpler syntactic
structures than the corresponding sentences with the other grammatically possible word order,
i.e. OSV (Hoji 1985, Saito 1985). SOV sentences can be used in pragmatically neutral contexts,
in contrast to OSV sentences, which are typically produced when the referent of the object is
discourse-given (Kuno 1978, Imamura and Koizumi 2011). The production frequency of SOV ishigher than that of OSV (97.2 % vs. 2.8%, respectively, according to Imamura and Koizumi2011). Together, these three factors seem to make SOV sentences easier to process than OSV
sentences in Japanese (Imamura and Koizumi 2008a, 2008b).
How about in Kaqchikel then? In Kaqchikel, VOS is the syntactically basic word order,
and therefore, it is associated with simpler syntactic structures than SVO, VSO, or any other10order. In terms of discourse-pragmatics, VOS can be used in various contexts, including apragmatically neutral context, whereas SVO is frequently used in contexts where the subject is a
topic (García Matzar and Rodríguez Guaján 1997: 334, Tichoc Cumes et al. 2000: 219-223,
Ajsivinac Sian et al. 2004: 178-180). VSO is employed mostly when the object is “heavy” or“complex” (England 1991: 474, Rodríguez Guaján 1994: 203, but see also García Matzar andRodríguez Guaján 1997: 341). Both of the syntactic and discourse-pragmatic factors presumably
made the VOS sentences easier to process than the SVO and VSO sentences in the present
experiment, which employed a sentence plausibility judgment task with no specific context
provided. As for the relationship between processing load and word order frequency, however,Kaqchikel seems to be different from SO languages like Japanese.
As we have pointed out in Section 3, the production frequency of SVO is higher thanthose of VOS and VSO in Kaqchikel (SVO 74.4%, VOS 24.2%, and VSO 1.4%, according to
Kubo et al. 2012). The production frequency factor, therefore, should facilitate the processing of
SVO compared to VOS and VSO. Restricting ourselves to VOS and SVO for the moment,
therefore, the syntactic complexity and discourse-pragmatic factors, on the one hand, and thefrequency of usage, on the other hand, presumably work in the opposite direction: The syntax
and pragmatics favor VOS, whereas the frequency favors SVO. The former overwhelms thelatter, resulting in the lower processing load of VOS. VSO is syntactically more complex than
VOS and is less complex than SVO, because the movement of the subject in SVO crosses (twodiscourse participants associated with) V and O, whereas the movement of the object in VSO
only crosses one element, i.e. S. The reaction time for VSO, however, was not significantly
different from that for SVO in the current experiment. This is presumably due to the fact that the
production frequency of VSO is lower than that of SVO. That is, the effects of syntax andfrequency cancel out each other, yielding comparable processing loads for VSO and SVO. The
relationship among word order, syntactic complexity, discourse-pragmatic requirements,
production frequency, and processing load is summarized in Table 2.
<INSERT TABLE 2 ABOUT HERE>
As we have seen, SVO is more frequently used than VOS in Kaqchikel. A question
naturally arises as to why this should be the case, despite the fact that SVO is not thesyntactically basic word order and is harder to process than VOS. There are three conceivablereasons. The first has to do with the head-marking nature of Kaqchikel. As mentioned earlier,Kaqchikel is a head-marking language that exhibits subject and object agreement markers on theverb. The verbal complex of a transitive sentence [Aspect-B-A-Verb stem] contains theinformation about the person and number of the subject and object. It has been shown in otherlanguages (e.g. English) that information on the verb (e.g. selectional restrictions) can
immediately be used to facilitate the processing of the subsequent region (Trueswell, Tanenhaus,

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and Kello 1993, Altmann and Kamide 1999). Therefore, in Kaqchikel, having a verbal complex
in the sentence-initial position may be advantageous in that it helps develop predictions about
the upcoming subject and object, rendering the processing of the subsequent portion of thesentence easier. In the case of sentence production, in contrast, verb-initial word orders in
Kaqchikel may be more disadvantageous than nominal-initial word orders such as SVO. This isbecause, in order to initiate a sentence with a verbal complex, conceptual and grammaticalinformation about the subject and object must have been activated and processed to a certain
degree, prior to the beginning of the utterance. Again in other languages, it has been shown thatthe complexity of the sentence-initial phrase is correlated with the time required to initiate theutterance (e.g. Smith and Wheeldon 1999), and that latencies are shorter for subject-verb
utterances than for verb-only utterances (Lindsley 1975). For this reason, therefore, SVO may
be less demanding than the verb-initial orders for Kaqchikel speakers, and hence, it is produced
more frequently than VOS and VSO.
A second possible factor, related to the first, for the preference of SVO in sentence
production is concerned with “disambiguation.” Since Kaqchikel is a head-marking language,
nouns are not marked as subjects versus objects. Therefore, in sentences where both subjects
and objects are animate nouns, such as the one in (4), it is ambiguous which of the nouns is the
subject and which is the object.
(4)

N-Ø-u- to’
IC-B3sg-A3sg- helps

ti ala’CL boyti xtän.
CL girl

In such cases, speakers of Mayan languages often prepose subjects before verbs to avoid
ambiguity and/or similarity-based interference (Skopeteas and Verhoeven 2009). Traditionally,in Kaqchikel, when subjects were preposed before the verb, the verb came to have a special
form, called an agent-focus antipassive. However, in contemporary speech, the alternation of theverb form is optional, and subjects can be preposed without changing the verb form (Tichoc
Cumes et al. 2000: 222, Ajsivinac Sian et al. 2004: 180). It is assumed that the frequency oftransitive, active sentences in SVO word order has thus increased.
Finally, the “saliency of subjects” may contribute to the frequency of SVO. It has been
observed in many languages that subjects tend to become topics of conversation more easily
than other immediate sentence constituents, and topics tend to appear at the beginning ofsentences. Indeed, in Mayan languages, constituents that appear before verbs are often
interpreted as the topic of the utterance, and the observation that space for a topic issyntactically secured before verbs is widely supported (England 1991, Aissen 1992, García
Matzar and Rodríguez Guaján 1997: 334). 11 This means that, although VOS is syntactically thebasic word order used in pragmatically neutral contexts and induces a lower processing load,
SVO is used more frequently in conversation because subjects are often preposed as the topic

12(Tichoc Cumes et al. 2000: 219-223, Ajsivinac Sian et al. 2004: 178-180). This last point leads
to the expectation that SVO sentences may be easier to process given an appropriate context,
which needs to be tested in future research.
As observed above, in Kaqchikel, SO word order, which causes a higher processing load,
is used more frequently than OS word order, which induces a lower processing load, arguably
for pragmatic reasons. If this is true not only of Kaqchikel, but also of other OS languages, itwould mean that OS languages are less economical in terms of linguistic performance. On theother hand, in SO languages, the syntactically simple word order, which triggers a lower
processing load, is also the frequently used word order; subjects appear in front as a topic, andthus, they are more economical. For example, in English, regardless of whether or not thereferent of the subject is the topic of the conversation, word order remains fixed as SVO.
Similarly, in Japanese, an SOV language, the subject is marked with the nominative case marker,
and the object with the accusative case marker, in pragmatically neutral contexts. When thereferent of the subject is a discourse topic, the subject is preposed and marked with the topic
marker. In either case, the word order is SOV. This is schematically shown in (5).
(5)

a.
b.

[S-nom O-acc V][S-top [O-acc V]]

[S-nom O-acc V] vs. [S-top [O-acc V]] in Japanese seems to be parallel to VOS vs.
SVO in Kaqchikel. [S-nom O-acc V] in Japanese and VOS in Kaqchikel are syntactically simple
and typically used in pragmatically neutral contexts. [S-top [O-acc V]] and SVO aresyntactically more complex and used in contexts where the subject is a topic. The production
frequencies of [S-top [O-acc V]] and SVO are several times higher than those of [S-nom
O-acc V] and VOS, respectively (See Imamura and Koizumi 2011 for Japanese). However, there
is a crucial difference between Japanese and Kaqchikel. In Japanese, both [S-nom O-acc V] and[S-top [O-acc V]] have SOV word order, and the difference in syntactic complexity
between them is minimal, the topicalization in (5b) being string vacuous. In fact, Sato andKoizumi (2011) observed that Japanese speakers processed [S-top [O-acc V]] as fast as[S-nom O-acc V]. They argue that this is because the syntactic complexity favors [S-nom O-acc
V], whereas the production frequency facilitates processing [S-top [O-acc V]], and thatthese two factors cancel out each other. Turning back to the processing of VOS and SVO in
Kaqchikel, we see that the syntactic complexity and production frequency work in the opposite
direction in Kaqchikel as well, as we have mentioned above. However, the difference insyntactic complexity between VOS and SVO in Kaqchikel is much larger than that between[S-nom O-acc V] and [S-top [O-acc V]] in Japanese, because in Kaqchikel SVO sentences,
V and O intervene between the preposed S and its original position. Thus, unlike in Japanese, in
Kaqchikel, the syntactic complexity factor has a larger impact on sentence processing than the

13frequency factor, resulting in a higher processing load for SVO, as we have argued above.
The economic efficiency of linguistic performance must still be carefully examined indetail in future research. However, the reason that over 95% of world languages are SO and few
have OS as the basic word order, as well as the reason that OS languages are relatively unstable,
occasionally shifting to SVO/VSO (Gell-Mann and Ruhlen 2011), might be explained, in part,by the fact that the syntactically determined word order does not coincide with the pragmaticallydetermined word order in OS languages.
6. CONCLUSION
The results of the sentence processing experiment showed that VOS, which is thesyntactically determined basic word order, has a lower processing load than SVO and VSO for
Kaqchikel speakers. This revealed that the preference for SO word order in sentencecomprehension observed in previous studies of SO languages is not universal; rather, processing
load in sentence comprehension is greatly affected by the syntactic nature of individual
languages. Further, in Kaqchikel, SVO (one of the SO word orders) has a higher productive
frequency than VOS, which is the syntactically determined basic word order. That is, the mostfrequently used word order in Kaqchikel is one that triggers a relatively higher processing load;hence, the language may be less optimal in this respect in terms of linguistic performance. If thisphenomenon of Kaqchikel is found in other OS languages as well, it might be one of the reasonsthat few OS languages exist in the world. Future studies should investigate processing load andsyntactic frequency in other OS languages to test this possibility.

14

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Notes
1
There are more indications for the universal nature of the SO word order preference. First,
Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language arose within the last 70 years in an isolated community witha high incidence of profound prelingual deafness. In the space of one generation, it assumed agrammatical structure characterized by SOV order (Sandler et al. 2005). Given that none of theneighboring languages are SOV, the SOV order seems to have emerged spontaneously in thelanguage without any apparent external influence. Second, Gell-Manna and Ruhlen (2011)
argued, based on the distribution of word order types in world languages, that the original word
order in the ancestral language was SOV. Finally, Goldin-Meadow et al. (2008) showed thatspeakers of languages that differ in their predominant word orders used the actor-patient-act
order, analogous to the SOV pattern, when asked to describe or reconstruct events without
speaking. They took this to suggest that actor-patient-act is the natural order we impose on
events when describing and reconstructing them nonverbally and exploit when constructing
language anew.
2
The following abbreviations are used in this paper. CL [Completive], IC [Incompletive], A[Set A ergative], B [Set B absolutive], 1 [First person], 3 [Third person], sg [Singular], pl[Plural], AF [Agent focus], DET [Determiner], CL [Classifier].
3
Results of a word order acquisition study in Kaqchikel (Sugisaki et al. 2012) suggest that
Kaqchikel-speaking 3-year-old children know that VOS is the unmarked order in their language.
Also, Pye (1992) showed that in K’iche’, a Mayan language closely related to Kaqchikel,
children acquire the VOS order early.
4
All six word orders that are logically possible are indeed allowed in many of the Mayan
languages including Kaqchikel (England 1991, García Matzar and Rodríguez Guaján 1997: 333).
SVO in particular is most frequently used. It has been suggested that this is due to the influenceof Spanish (Maxwell and Little 2006), but the fact that all six word orders, including SVO,
appear in 16th century Kaqchikel texts shows that SVO was used before the language had
contact with Spanish (Rodríguez Guaján 1989 quoted in England 1991, García Matzar andRodríguez Guaján 1997: 334).
5
When all the 61 participants were included in the analysis, due to large variability, no word
order preference or correlation between accuracy rates and word order preference was found.
6
VSO ordered sentences were included in the test for comparative standard. In other words,
VSO is neither the syntactically canonical order nor the order most frequently used. The
production frequency of VSO is third compared to SVO and VOS. Note also that VSO is
minimally different from VOS in that only the order of S and O are reversed, whereas SVO
diverges from VOS not only in the order of S and O but also in the relative order of S and V.
7
Sentence length is what is indicated by the software program Praat and is shown to two

19

decimal places.
8
Given that VOS is preferred to SVO in Kaqchikel, one might wonder if, in ergative languages
such as Kaqchikel, Absolutive-Ergative orders are preferred to Ergative-Absolutive orders, i.e.,
the Absolutive-Ergative word order preference is observed. It has been reported, however, thatin Basque, an SOV ergative language with pro-drop, SOV (= Ergative-Absolutive-V) sentences
are easier to process than corresponding OSV (= Absolutive-Ergative-V) sentences (Erdocia etal. 2009). This, together with the results of the present experiment, suggests that inergative-absolutive languages as well as in nominative-accusative languages, the most preferredword order is the syntactically basic word order.
9This discourse-pragmatic requirement for derived word orders is related to their syntactic
complexity: Since derived word orders are associated with syntactically complex structures andhence are harder to process, the language user would take the trouble to employ them only toachieve a specific goal.
10
The higher frequency of the syntactically basic word order is also related to its syntactic
complexity: Since the syntactically basic word order is associated with syntactically simpler
structures, and hence easier to process than derived word orders, (other things being equal) it
tends to be used more frequently.
11
In Mayan languages, a focused element also occurs preverbally, sometimes simultaneouslywith a topic (Aissen 1992, García Matzar and Rodríguez Guaján 1997: 337 and 341, see also
Stiebels 2006, Preminger 2011). This also seems to contribute to the high frequency of SVO in
Kaqchikel and other Mayan languages.

20

Table 1
Reaction times and error rates of transitive sentences judged as semantically correct(M = mean, SD = standard deviation)
Reaction time (ms)Error rate (%)
Word order
M
SD
M
SD
VOS
3,403
673
10.61
30.85
SVO
3,559
663
7.58
26.51
VSO
3,601
674
22.90
42.10
Note: n = 22

Table 2
Relationship among word order, syntactic complexity, production frequency, and processing
load in Kaqchikel
Word order
FactorVOS
SVO
VSO
Syntactic complexity
simplecomplexmediumDiscourse-pragmatics
less restricted
restricted
restricted
Production frequency
mediumhigh
low
Processing load

low

high

high