| Authors | Urosevic, Z., Carello, C., Savic, M., Lukatela, G., & Turvey, M. T. |
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| Abstract | In Serbo-Croatian, the relative order of subject (S), verb (V), & object (O) is flexible. All six permutations of those elements have identical words, meaning, & voice, & all six are grammatically acceptable. Nevertheless, SVO is the dominant form. The psychological reality of this dominance was assessed in three experiments. In experiment 1, high school speakers of Serbo-Croatian (N = 80) viewed sentences & were asked to decide as rapidly as possible whether each sentence described a meaningful, possible event. Target sentences were variants of a set of 46 semantically plausible & 46 semantically implausible three-word sentences. In experiment 2 (N = 42 undergraduates), Subjects viewed sentences similar to those in experiment 1 & were asked to say each aloud as rapidly as possible. In experiment 3 (N = 75 high school students), Ss participated in a lexical decision task using Vs & pseudo-Vs as targets in (SO)V, (OS)V, & (***)V contexts. In experiment 1, SVO was associated with the shortest latencies. The same advantage was found in experiment 2 but not in experiment 3. Results are discussed in terms of linguistic universals of word order & K. I. Forster's model ("Levels of Processing and the Structure of the Language Processor" in Sentence Processing, Cooper, W. E., & Walker, E. C. [Eds], Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1979) of the language processor. |
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