Syntactic properties such as word orders are a major factor determining the difficulty of a sentence. In SO-type languages where the subject (S) precedes the object (O) in canonical word order, there is clear evidence that the SO word order is preferred over the OS word order. We investigate to what extent this SO bias is maintained even in typologically diverse languages like Truku, an Austronesian language, in which the Verb-Object-Subject (VOS) word order is canonical and a syntactically basic structure, and SVO is the derived word order and a syntactically more complex structure. It is important to investigate word order preferences in Truku because such inquiries allow us to determine to what extent these widely observed processing preferences are grounded in properties of the linguistic system and/or somewhat more general human cognitive properties. The syntactic complexity account predicts that, in Truku, the derived SVO word order should be more costly, while the saliency account predicts that the word orders in which an agent precedes a theme is preferred. Our auditory comprehension experiment showed that the OS word order was preferred by native speakers of Truku. This indicates that the often-observed SO preference is not a universal feature of language. Furthermore, the lack of a clear indication of the agent-before-theme preference suggests a correlation between the voice property of a given language and the importance of the saliency factor.

中文翻译：

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Seediq中的语法和处理：行为研究

诸如单词顺序之类的句法属性是确定句子难度的主要因素。在主题语言（S）在对象（O）之前按规范的单词顺序排列的SO类型语言中，有明显的证据表明，与OS单词顺序相比，SO单词顺序更受欢迎。我们研究了即使在类型不同的语言（例如Truku）中也保持了这种SO偏向，例如Truku（一种南斯拉夫语系语言），其中动词-宾语-主题（VOS）词序是规范的和句法上的基本结构，而SVO是派生的词序以及语法上更复杂的结构。在Truku中研究单词顺序首选项很重要，因为此类查询使我们能够确定这些广泛观察到的处理首选项在多大程度上基于语言系统的特性和/或更一般的人类认知特性。句法复杂性帐户预测，在Truku中，派生的SVO单词顺序应该更昂贵，而显着性帐户则预测首选在主体之前出现代理的单词顺序。我们的听觉理解实验表明，操作系统单词顺序是Truku母语使用者的首选。这表明经常观察到的SO偏好不是语言的通用特征。此外，