Faculty: Samar Husain
Abstrac
Crosslinguistic word order variation can be understood as a consequence of processing con straints. While the effect of word order during sentence comprehension has been studied for pro cessing at the verb, its influence on verbal prediction is less understood. In this work we investigate the influence of two factors, namely, noncanonical word order and argumentverb proximity on verbal prediction in Hindi. Results show that these factors adversely affect verbal prediction and lead to increased parsing error. The current account to predictive processing are unable to ex plain the results. Broadly, the results highlight the overarching influence of workingmemory constraints during sentence comprehension and thereby on the parser to posit less complex structures crosslinguistically. The current work shows that word order is indeed reflective of memory constraints and any deviation from such optimal configurations leads to difficulty in topdown processing as well.
Effect of noncanonical word order and argument proximity on processing of SOV languages. Apurva and Samar Husain. In P. Chandra (ed) Variation in South Asian Languages: From Macro to Micro-differences. Springer Nature. 2022. (Forthcoming).