Poster E35, Thursday, August 22, 2019, 3:45 – 5:30 pm, Restaurant Hall
Is the VSO word order canonical in Arabic? Evidence from ERPs
Ali Idrissi1, Eiman Mustafawi1, Tariq Khwaileh1, R. Muralikrishnan2;1Qatar University, 2Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics
Introduction. Among the permissible word orders in Standard Arabic, verb-initial VSO and subject-initial SVO orders are predominant. Traditionally, however, VSO is considered the unmarked/canonical order, with SVO considered its ‘marked’ variant. In a visual ERP study, we investigated the neural signatures of word-order differences in Standard Arabic, and hypothesized that additional processing costs should ensue at the position of the object in the SVO order as opposed to the VSO order, if VSO is indeed processed as the canonical order. Alternatively, if the two orders have the same status in the grammar, no additional processing costs should be observable in processing SVO. Methods. We employed transitive sentences in three word-orders: VSO, SVO and Adverb-VO. The adverb in the subject-dropped sentences in the AVO order was identical (‘yesterday’) in all sentences. All critical stimuli and fillers in the experiment were grammatical, well-formed sentences. Further, subjects and objects were all human singular nouns; the subject was always feminine, with which the verb agreed in person, number and gender; and the object was always masculine. Thus, there was no ambiguity at the position of the object (critical position) as to its objecthood. Thirty right-handed female native speakers of Arabic, all of them students at Qatar University, participated in the study. EEG was recorded using 25 Ag-AgCl active scalp electrodes fixed on an elastic cap (Easycap GmbH, Germany). AFZ served as the ground electrode; recordings were referenced online to the left mastoid, but re referenced to the average of the linked mastoids offline. Results. The ERP results at the position of the object revealed a negativity effect in the 400 to 600 ms time-window for the SVO and AVO conditions, as opposed to the VSO condition. Further, there was a late-positivity effect in the 600 to 800 ms time-window for the AVO condition, as opposed to the VSO condition. Based on their topography and latency, these effects can be plausibly interpreted as instances of N400 and P600. Given that the pre-critical words and their categories were necessarily different in the three word-orders, we checked for possible upstream effects that might have played a role at the critical position. However, ERPs time-locked to the sentence onset for the entire epoch of the sentence and sentence-wide difference waves between the critical conditions showed that the critical effects at the position of the object are independent of effects from the pre-critical positions. Discussion. The pattern of results we found suggests additional processing costs ensuing from integrating the object in the SVO and AVO orders compared to the VSO order. We interpret the late-positivity for the AVO condition as a consequence of enriched composition (Schumacher, 2011) of the inferred dropped subject. Taken together, these findings support the hypothesis that additional processing costs ensue during the integration of the object, when the order was SVO as opposed to VSO. Thus, our results provide the first neurophysiological evidence for the canonical/central status of the VSO order in Arabic.
Themes: Syntax, Multilingualism
Method: Electrophysiology (MEG/EEG/ECOG)