effects of word order alternation on the sentence processing of sinhalese written and spoken forms影响句子的词序交替处理僧伽罗人的书面和口头形式.pdfVIP

Open Journal of Modern Linguistics 2011. Vol.1, No.2, 24-32 Copyright © 2011 SciRes. DOI:10.4236/ojml.2011.12004 Effects of Word Order Alternation on the Sentence Processing of Sinhalese Written and Spoken Forms 1 1 2 Katsuo Tamaoka , Prabath Buddhika Arachchige Kanduboda , Hiromu Sakai 1Graduate School of Languages and Cultures, Nagoya University, Aichi, Japan; 2Graduate School of Education, Hiroshima University, Hiroshima, Japan. Email: ktamaoka@lang.nagoya-u.ac.jp nd th th Received September 22 , 2011; revised November 19 , 2011; accepted November 27 , 2011. In both written and spoken forms, the Sinhalese language allows all six possible word orders for active sentences with transitive verbs (i.e., SOV, OSV, SVO, OVS, VSO, and VOS), even though its unmarked order is sub- ject-object-verb (SOV) (e.g., Gair, 1998; Miyagishi, 2003; Yamamoto, 2003). Reaction times for sentence cor- rectness decisions showed SOV SVO = OVS = OSV = VSO = VOS for the written form, and SOV SVO = OVS OSV = VSO = VOS for the spoken form. The different degrees of reaction times may correspond to the three different types of word order alternation. First, the fastest reaction time for SOV word order corresponds to