On the Learnability of Frequent and Infrequent Word Orders: An Artificial Language Learning Study

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  • ángel Tabullo
    Institute of Medicine and Experimental Biology, Conicet, Buenos Aires, Argentina
  • Mariana Arismendi
    Faculty of Psychology, University of Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, Argentina
  • Alejandro Wainselboim
    Institute of Medicine and Experimental Biology, Conicet, Buenos Aires, Argentina
  • Gerardo Primero
    Faculty of Psychology, University of Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, Argentina
  • Sergio Vernis
    Faculty of Psychology, University of Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, Argentina
  • Enrique Segura
    Institute of Medicine and Experimental Biology, Conicet, Buenos Aires, Argentina
  • Silvano Zanutto
    Institute of Medicine and Experimental Biology, Conicet, Buenos Aires, Argentina
  • Alberto Yorio
    Institute of Medicine and Experimental Biology, Conicet, Buenos Aires, Argentina

説明

<jats:p> Most languages have a basic or “canonical” word order, which determines the relative positions of the subject (S), the verb (V), and the object (O) in a typical declarative sentence. The frequency of occurrence of the six possible word orders among world languages is not distributed uniformly. While SVO and SOV represent around 85% of world languages, orders like VSO (9%) or OSV (0.5%) are much less frequent or extremely rare. One possible explanation for this asymmetry is that biological and cognitive constraints for structured sequence processing make some word orders easier to be processed than others. Therefore, the high frequency of these word orders would be related to their higher learnability. The aim of the present study was to compare the learnability of different word orders between groups of adult subjects. Four artificial languages with different word orders were trained: two frequent (SVO, SOV) and two infrequent (VSO, OSV). In a test stage, subjects were asked to discriminate between new correct sentences and syntax or semantic violations. Higher performance rates and faster responses were observed for more frequent word orders. The results support the hypothesis that more frequent word orders are more easily learned. </jats:p>

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