Linear ordering preferences in Japanese: Implications for current production models

The current research investigates the claim that sort-before-long (SL) constituent orderings are easier to produce than long-beforeshort (LS) orderings (e.g., Stallings et al., 1998). 12 Japanese native speakers repeated LS and SL ordered simple transitive and double object sentences. In a control condition, participants repeated sentences directly, and in another participants performed a memory task before repeating target sentences. In the memory task condition, processing resources are taxed and therefore more errors are predicted for harder to produce orderings. Results show that SL orderings for all constructions had significantly more errors in the memory task condition as compared to the control. Errors for LS ordered constructions in the memory task and control condition were not significantly different except S-DO-V ordered simple transitive constructions. The findings suggest that SL orderings are generally harder to produce than LS orderings in Japanese and go against previous claims. Implications are discussed for both accessibility (e.g., Stallings et al. 1998) and functionally based (e.g., Hawkins, 1994) models of linear ordering.