“Previous studies indicate that when people are asked to represent simple events using only gestural signs, they show a strong preference for SOV order (subject – object – verb), even when they are native speakers of an SVO language such as English,” explains Peer Christensen, the lead author of the paper and a PhD at the University of Lund.

“However, we show that by manipulating specific environmental and social-interactional factors we can influence whether participants will spontaneously produce SOV or SVO for communicating events”.

The role of material and social surroundings

Study participants were asked to communicate stimuli depicting simple events to each other using only their hands. In response to events in which human agents manipulated objects, participants consistently used SOV to string together individual signs. However, when presented with object construction events, they instead used SVO. The researchers argue that the two syntactic patterns are motivated by iconicity, whereby the syntactic structure reflects inherent structural properties of the two event types. More.

See: EurekAlert! Science News

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