Sentence planning and production in Murrinhpatha, an Australian 'free word order' language

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 influ- enced by agent and patient humanness. An analysis of eye movements showed that Murrinhpatha speakers’ first fixation on an event character did not alone determine word order; rather, early in speech planning participants rapidly encoded both event characters and their relationship to each other. That is, they engaged in relational encoding , laying down a very early conceptual foundation for the word order they eventually produced. These results support a weakly hierarchi- cal account of sentence production and show that speakers of a free word order language encode the relationships between event participants during earlier stages of sentence planning than is typ- ically observed for languages with fixed word orders.*