Journal article
Sentence planning and production in Murrinhpatha, an Australian 'free word order' language
Rachel Nordlinger, Gabriela Garrido Rodriguez, Evan Kidd
Language (Washington) | Linguistic Society of America | Published : 2022
Abstract
Psycholinguistic theories are based on a very small set of unrepresentative languages, so it is as yet unclear how typological variation shapes mechanisms supporting language use. In this article we report the first on-line experimental study of sentence production in an Australian free word order language: Murrinhpatha. Forty-six adult native speakers of Murrinhpatha described a series of unrelated transitive scenes that were manipulated for humanness (±human) in the agent and patient roles while their eye movements were recorded. Speakers produced a large range of word orders, consistent with the language having flexible word order, with variation significantly influenced by agent and pati..
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Awarded by Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language
Funding Acknowledgements
This research has been generously supported by the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language (Project ID: CE140100041) and by the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen. We would like to thank Carmelita Perdjert, Norma Kolumboort, Lorraine Tunmuck, and all participants from the Wadeye community. We would also like to thank Bill Forshaw, Lucy Davidson, John Mansfield, and Mark Crocombe for help recruiting and testing in Wadeye. Steve Levinson, Elisabeth Norcliffe, Sebastian Sauppe, Javier E. Garrido Guillen, and Agnieszka Konopka have provided valuable advice during the project. We particularly thank Agnieszka Konopka for providing us with some of our stimuli materials. For many helpful comments and suggestions that greatly improved this paper, we are grateful to Andries Coetzee, Titus von der Malsburg, Kiel Christianson, and an anonymous referee. All remaining errors are our own.