Processing Verb Medial Word Orders in a Verb Final Language

Abstract

We compared the processing of verb-medial sentences in Basque. Syntactic analysis claims that all word orders other than SOV are derived in this language; therefore, verb medial sentences are expected to show signs of syntactic displacement and be equally complex to process. A self-paced reading task measured the processing time for each constituent of the sentences in order to analyze the processing of verb-medial SVO and OVS structures. Our data showed that sentences with verb-medial word orders were processed equally. This result suggests that both SVO and OVS sentences are indeed syntactically derived from the canonical SOV word order, shown in previous work to be easiest computationally.