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

Bibliographic Data

ID7150302
AuthorsEvan Kidd (0000-0003-4301-2290, School of Literature, Languages, and Linguistics The Australian National University, corresponding author), Gabriela Garrido Rodríguez (0000-0002-7397-9067, ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language), Sasha Wilmoth (0000-0002-6626-9104, ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language), Javier E Garrido Guillén (School of Engineering and Science Tecnológico de Monterrey), Rachel Nordlinger (0000-0003-4126-8022, ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language)
Year2025
Volume49
Issue7
Pagese70087-e70087
Publication date2025-07-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueCognitive Science (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0364-0213 • E-ISSN: 1551-6709
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/cogs.70087
PMID40684369
OpenAlexW4412495074
LanguageEN
References cited92

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 produce agent‐initial orders, but word order was influenced by the semantic properties of agent and patient referents (± human). Analyses of participants’ eye‐movements revealed early relational encoding of the entire event, whereby speakers distributed their attention between agent and patient referents in a manner that is different than typically observed in languages that have more restricted word order options. Relational encoding was influenced by the word order that participants eventually produced. The results provide evidence to suggest that sentence planning in Pitjantjatjara is a hierarchical process, in which early relational encoding creates a wholistic conceptualization of an event, possibly driven by pressure to decide upon one of many possible word orders

Cognition · Conceptualization · Language production · Linguistics · Natural language processing · Sentence · Verb · Word order · Computer Science · Hearing Impairment and Communication · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition · Neurobiology of Language and Bilingualism · Psychology · Artificial Intelligence