How Does Speaking A Free Word Order Language Influence Sentence Planning and Production? Evidence From Pitjantjatjara (Pama-Nyungan, Australia)

Abstract

Sentence production is a stage-like process of mapping a conceptual representation to the linear speech signal via grammatical rules. While the typological diversity of languages is vast and thus must necessarily influence sentence production, psycholinguistic studies of diverse languages are comparatively rare. Here, we present data from a sentence planning and production study in Pitjantjatjara, an Australian Indigenous language that has highly flexible word order. Forty-nine (N = 49) native speakers described pictures of two-participant scenes while their eye-movements were recorded. Participants produced all possible orders of agent, patient, and verb. There was a general preference to p..