Open Journal of Modern Linguistics
2013. Vol.3, No.3, 203-207
Published Online September 2013 in SciRes (http://www.scirp.org/journal/ojml) http://dx.doi.org/10.4236/ojml.2013.33027
Effect of Animacy on Word Order Processing in Kaqchikel Maya
Sachiko Kiyama1, Katsuo Tamaoka2, Jungho Kim3, Masatoshi Koizumi3
1Functional Brain Imaging Lab, National Center for Geriatrics and Gerontology, Ohbu, Japan
2Graduate School of Languages and Cultures, Nagoya University, Nagoya, Japan
3Graduate School of Arts and Letters, Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan
Received June 24th, 2013; revised July 23rd, 2013; accepted July 30th, 2013
Copyright © 2013 Sachiko Kiyama et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons
Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the
original work is properly cited.
This study investigated the processing load of transitive sentences in two different basic word orders (i.e.,
VOS and SVO) in Kaqchikel Maya, with a particular focus on the animacy of the object. The results of a
sentence plausibility judgment task showed that VOS sentences were processed faster than SVO sen-
tences regardless of the animacy of the object. This supports the traditional analysis in Mayan linguistics
that, although SVO is the most frequently used word order, the syntactically determined basic word order
is VOS in Kaqchikel, as in many other Mayan languages. More importantly, the results suggest that the
processing load in Kaqchikel sentence comprehension is more strongly affected by syntactic canonicity
than production frequency or object animacy.
Keywords: Animacy; Sentence Processing; SO Word Order Preference; Syntax; Kaqchikel
Introduction
According to experimental findings from languages such as
Basque, English, Finnish, German, and Japanese, sentences in
which the subject (S) precedes the object (O) (SO word order =
SOV, SVO, VSO) induce a lower processing load for compre-
hension than those in which the opposite occurs (OS word or-
der = OSV, OVS, VOS), and thus, they are preferred by speak-
ers (Bader & Meng, 1999; Erdocia et al., 2009; Kaiser &
Trueswell, 2004; Mazuka, Itoh, & Kondo, 2002; Sekerina, 1997;
Tamaoka et al., 2005; Tamaoka et al., 2013; among many oth-
ers). However, these previous studies on sentence processing
have all targeted languages in which the subject precedes the
object in syntactically basic word orders (i.e., SO languages).
Hence, it remains unclear whether the preference for SO is a
reflection of word order in individual languages or more uni-
versal human cognitive features. What we refer to as individual
grammar theory in this paper posits that a language’s syntacti-
cally determined basic word order has a low processing load in
comparison with other possible word orders (e.g., Gibson, 2000),
whereas what may be referred to as universal cognition theory
hypothesizes that SO word order has a low processing load
regardless of the basic word order of any individual language
(e.g., Bock & Warren, 1985). To verify which of these two the-
ories is correct, it is necessary to examine languages in which
the object precedes the subject in syntactically basic word orders
(i.e., OS languages), for which the two theories develop differ-
ent predictions.
Koizumi et al. (under review) conducted a sentence-proc-
essing experiment in Kaqchikel, a Mayan language spoken in
Guatemala. The syntactically determined basic word order of
Kaqchikel is VOS, although in general, word order is relatively
flexible (García Matzar & Rodríguez Guaján, 1997: p. 333).
They found that VOS was processed faster than the two other
commonly used word orders, VSO and SVO. This suggests that
the preference for SO in sentence comprehension is not univer-
sal; rather, syntactic features of individual languages signifi-
cantly influence sentence processing load. In other words, the
individual grammar theory, rather than the universal cognition
theory, was supported.
It is interesting to note at this point that the production fre-
quency of SVO is higher than that of VOS in Kaqchikel: SVO
(74.4%) vs. VOS (24.2%), according to Kubo et al. (2012). The
production frequency factor, therefore, should facilitate the pro-
cessing of SVO compared to VOS. The syntactic complexity
and frequency of usage presumably work in the opposite direc-
tion: the syntax favors VOS, whereas the frequency favors SVO.
The former overwhelms the latter, resulting in the lower proc-
essing load of VOS. A confounding factor here has to do with
the animacy of the object. In Kaqchikel, SVO order is more fre-
quently used when the object denotes an animate entity such as
a human, compared to when the object is inanimate: SVO
(87.1%) vs. VOS (12.9%) with animate objects; SVO (60.9%)
vs. VOS (39.1%) with inanimate objects (Kubo et al., 2012).
The target sentences used in Koizumi et al.’s (under review)
experiment all have an object denoting an inanimate entity such
as a book. Thus, it is possible that VOS was processed faster
than SVO in their experiment because they used sentences with
inanimate objects, for which the difference between VOS and
SVO, in terms of production frequency, is relatively small. In
other words, SVO sentences might be processed faster than
VOS sentences if the object is animate, in which case the diffe-
rence in production frequency between VOS and SVO is much
greater. To test if this is indeed the case, we conducted an au-
ditorily presented sentence plausibility judgment task (e.g., Ca-
plan, Chen, & Waters, 2008).

S. KIYAMA ET AL.
204
Kaqchikel
Kaqchikel is 1 of the 21 Mayan languages spoken in Guate-
mala. It is mainly used in the highlands west of Guatemala City,
the capital. With over 450,000 speakers, it is one of the princi-
pal Mayan languages along with K’iche’, Q’eqchi’, and Mam
(Brown, Maxwell, & Little, 2006: p. 2; Lewis, 2009; Tay Co-
yoy, 1996: p. 55).
Like other Mayan languages, Kaqchikel is head marking:
subjects and objects are unmarked, and person and number
agreement for both subjects and objects are obligatorily ex-
pressed on the verb. Kaqchikel is ergative, like other Mayan
languages. In Mayan linguistics, ergative agreement markers
(i.e., those that indicate the subject of a transitive verb) are call-
ed Set A, and absolutive agreement markers (which indicate
either the subject of an intransitive verb or object of a transitive
verb) are known as Set B. The order of morphemes in the verb
is [Aspect-B-A-Verb stem]1. An example is given in 1) below.
1) Y-e’-in-to’
IC-B3PL-A1SG-help
“I help them.”
Since Kaqchikel is a pro-drop language, 1) functions as both
independent speech and an independent sentence.
Like its ancestor language, Kaqchikel’s syntactically deter-
mined basic word order is VOS, but SVO and VSO are also
possible (Rodríguez Guaján, 1994: p. 200; García Matzar & Ro-
dríguez Guaján, 1997: p. 333; Tichoc Cumes et al., 2000: p.
195; Ajsivinac Sian et al., 2004: p. 162). According to England
(1991), these word orders are derived from VOS through reor-
dering rules, as schematically shown in 2)2.
2) Order Derivation
VOS [VOS]
VSO [[V S] REORDERED O]
SVO [REORDERED S [VO ]]
Aissen (1992) has proposed more elaborate syntactic struc-
tures for Mayan sentences with these word orders, but her
analysis agrees with England’s in that VSO and SVO word
orders are associated with more complex syntactic structures
than VOS word order (see also Coon, 2010; Preminger, 2011).
Given this feature, the following predictions can be made
about processing load in the comprehension of Kaqchikel sen-
tences: if the preference for SO word order shown by speakers
of SO languages is mainly caused by the syntactic structure of
the individual language, as suggested by the individual gram-
mar theory, VOS sentences should have a lower processing
load than VSO or SVO sentences in Kaqchikel. On the other
hand, if SO triggers a lower processing load than OS regardless
of the basic word order of the individual grammar, as suggested
by the universal cognition theory, then Kaqchikel VOS sen-
tences should create a greater processing load than the other
two word orders. Koizumi et al. (under review) conducted a
sentence-processing experiment to test these predictions. The
results of the experiment revealed that for Kaqchikel speakers,
the processing load of VOS is lower than that of the two other
commonly used word orders, VSO and SVO.
As mentioned in the previous section, however, the produc-
tion frequency of SVO is higher than that of VOS in Kaqchikel.
Furthermore, SVO order is more frequently produced when the
object denotes an animate entity such as a human, compared to
when the object is inanimate: SVO (87.1%) vs. VOS (12.9%)
with animate objects; SVO (60.9%) vs. VOS (39.1%) with ina-
nimate objects (Kubo et al., 2012). The target sentences used in
Koizumi et al.’s (under review) experiment all have an inani-
mate object. Thus, it is possible that VOS was processed faster
than SVO in their experiment because they used sentences with
inanimate objects, for which the difference between VOS and
SVO, in terms of production frequency, is relatively small. In
other words, SVO sentences might be processed faster than
VOS sentences if the object is animate, in which case the dif-
ference in production frequency between VOS and SVO is
much greater. To test this idea, this study conducted a sentence
plausibility judgment task to evaluate the effect of object ani-
macy on sentence processing load in Kaqchikel Maya.
Method
Participants
A total of 53 Kaqchikel native speakers who live in Guate-
mala (28 males; mean age ± SD = 34.7 years ± 10.6) gave their
written, informed consent to participate in the research. Be-
cause of considerable dialectal and idiolectal variation among
Kaqchikel speakers, the data of participants who had less than
80% accuracy in the experiment were excluded, leaving the
data of 24 participants in the final analysis.
Materials
Semantically natural, grammatical transitive sentences were
arranged into each of the two word orders (VOS and SVO), as
shown in 3). Eighty pairs, for 160 target sentences, were cre-
ated in this way. Forty pairs of sentences among the 80 pairs
had an animate object, and the remaining 40 pairs had an in-
animate object. The subject was always animate.
3)a. [VOS]
X-e-ru-pïs ri taq lej ri ch’utitata’
CP-B3PL-A3SG-wrap DET PM tortilla DETuncle
“The uncle wrapped the tortillas.”
b. [SVO]
Ri ch’utitata’X-e-ru-pïs ri taq lej
DET uncle CP-B3PL-A3SG-wrap DETPMtortilla
Among the 80 sentence pairs, the number of letters did not
differ significantly between subjects (M = 10.2 letters, SD = 2.0
letters) and objects (M = 9.7 letters, SD = 2.0 letters) (t79 = 1.61,
p = .11, ns.). Representative examples along with their English
translations are shown in the Appendix.
Additionally, 40 transitive sentences that were grammatical
but not semantically natural were arranged in each of the two
1The following abbreviations are used in this paper. IC [Incompletive], CP
[completive], A [Set A ergative], B [Set B absolutive], 3 [third person], SG
[singular], PL [plural], DET [determiner], PM [plural marker for nouns].
2All six word orders that are logically possible are indeed allowed in many
of the Mayan languages, including Kaqchikel (England, 1991; García Matzar
& Rodríguez Guaján, 1997: p. 333). SVO in particular is most frequently
used. It has been suggested that this is due to the influence of Spanish
(Maxwell & Little, 2006), but the fact that all six word orders, including
SVO, appear in 16th-century Kaqchikel texts shows that SVO was used be-
fore the language had contact with Spanish (Rodríguez Guaján, 1989 quoted
in England, 1991; García Matzar & Rodríguez Guaján, 1997: p. 334).

S. KIYAMA ET AL.
word orders. They were semantically implausible mostly be-
cause of selectional restriction violations (e.g., #Xuch’äj ri
kaq’ïq’ ri xta Selfa “Miss Selfa washed the air”). All 120 sen-
tence pairs, consisting of 240 sentences, were counterbalanced
and then categorized into two groups according to word order.
Further, 192 filler sentences were added to each group. All the
stimulus sentences were recorded by a male native Kaqchikel
speaker and saved as WAV sound files.
The duration of each of the recorded semantically plausible
sentences was trimmed in Praat ver. 5.1.31 (Boersma, 2001) to
reduce the difference between the VOS and SVO sentences
within each pair as much as possible. The trimming was done
by slightly shortening the duration of some pauses between
phrases. The difference between the duration of VOS sentences
(M = 3274 ms, SD = 299) and that of SVO sentences (M = 3274
ms, SD = 299) was not significant (t79 = .130, p = .897, ns.). All
the trimmed sentences were judged as natural in terms of pros-
ody by our native Kaqchikel consultants.
Procedure
The participants listened to the stimulus sentences in a ran-
dom order through headphones. They were asked to judge whether
each sentence was semantically plausible and to answer by
pushing a YES button (correct sentence) or NO button (incur-
rect sentence), as quickly and accurately as possible. The time
from the beginning of each stimulus sentence until the button
pressing was recorded as the reaction time. E-Prime ver. 2.0
(Psychology Software Tools) was used for presenting the stim-
uli and obtaining the behavioral data.
Analysis
Among the 80 pairs of semantically plausible sentences, only
items that were correctly judged by each participant were ana-
lyzed. Reaction times ranged from 1223 ms to 7635 ms, and all
of them were within 2.5 standard deviations at both the high
and low ranges from the individual mean of each participant in
each category. Statistical analyses were conducted using a lin-
ear mixed effects (LME) model (e.g., Baayen, 2008) based on
the restricted maximum-likelihood method (REML), which esti-
mates the effects of fixed variables that are of interest in the
study over random effects that can be assumed as being ran-
domly sampled from the population. In this study, we assumed
the word order of sentences (i.e., VOS vs. SVO) and animacy
of the object (i.e., animate vs. inanimate) as fixed variables, and
participant and item (i.e., stimulus sentence) as random vari-
ables. PASW ver. 18.0J (SPSS, Inc., 2008) was used to conduct
the analysis.
Results
Table 1 shows the means and standard deviations of accu-
racy rates for the 80 sets of semantically plausible transitive
sentences in the VOS and SVO word orders with animate and
inanimate objects. The LME analysis indicated that both fixed
effects of the word order (F1, 936 = .354, p = .552, ns.) and ob-
ject animacy (F1, 1032 = 1.690, p = .194, ns.) were not significant.
The interaction effect of the two variables was not significant
either (F1, 933 = .174, p = .677, ns.).
Table 2 shows the means and standard deviations of reaction
times for the correctly judged semantically plausible target
sentences. The same analysis revealed that the fixed effect of
Talbe 1.
Accuracy rates (%) of sentence plausibility judgment for Kaqchikel
VOS and SVO sentences with animate and inanimate objects.
Animate object Inaminate object
M (%) SD (%) M (%) SD (%)
VOS 79.6 40.4 81.7 38.8
SVO 77.1 42.1 81.3 39.1
Talbe 2.
Reaction times (ms) of sentence plausibility judgment for Kaqchikel
VOS and SVO sentences with animate and inanimate objects.
Animate object Inaminate object
M (ms) SD (ms) M (ms) SD (ms)
VOS 3856 597 3839 715
SVO 3911 585 3964 706
word order was significant (F1, 741 = 4.983, p < .05). The fixed
effect of object animacy (F1, 741 = .040, p = .842, ns.) and the
interaction effect of the two variables (F1, 740 = .692, p = .406,
ns.) were not significant. The results indicated that the differ-
ence of reaction times (91 ms) between VOS sentences (M =
3847 ms, SD = 658 ms) and SVO sentences (M = 3938 ms, SD
= 650 ms) was significant, regardless of the object animacy.
Discussion
In order to explore the processing load of transitive sentences
in two commonly used word orders (i.e., VOS and SVO) in
Kaqchikel Maya with reference to the animacy of the object,
this study conducted an experiment with a sentence plausibility
judgment task. The results of the LME analysis showed that
VOS was processed faster than SVO regardless of the animacy
of the object. That is, although SVO is more frequently pro-
duced when the object is animate compared to when the object
is inanimate, the sentence processing load is not significantly
affected by this difference. Rather, syntactic features play a
more prominent role in sentence processing, a conclusion con-
sistent with the individual grammar theory.
A question naturally arises as to why SVO is more frequently
used when the object is animate compared to when it is inani-
mate, even though the animacy of the object does not affect the
processing load3. We suggest that this is because the choice of
SO vs. OS order in sentence production is primarily determined
by conceptual factors at earlier stages of sentence production
(Bock et al., 1985; Tanaka et al., 2011) without regard to the
overall computational load, which is also strongly affected by
processes in subsequent stages such as the construction of syn-
tactic structures. In particular, we agree with Kubo et al. (2012)
that similarity-based competition is the key factor here.
Gennari et al. (2012) argues that when there is a temporal
overlap in the planning of two conceptually similar nouns, the
similarity leads to interference between the semantic informa-
tion of the nouns. As a result, when the concept of one noun is
activated, the concept of the other noun is inhibited, and the
latter noun is mentioned away from the initially activated noun,
or simply omitted in the sentence. Moreover, the effect of con-
3This question is related to but different from the question of why SVO is
more frequently used than VOS, the syntactically basic word order, in
Kaqchikel. For a discussion of the latter, see Koizumi et al. (under review).

S. KIYAMA ET AL.
206
ceptual similarity interacts with language-specific grammatical
constraints, and the actual instantiation may vary across lan-
guages. Kubo et al. (2012) examined how similarity-based
competition influences speakers’ choices of sentence patterns in
Kaqchikel. The production of VOS sentences is interesting be-
cause the most accessible element, an animate agent noun usu-
ally realized as the subject, must be retained in memory until
the end of the sentence, and hence, it potentially competes with
other elements. If similarity-based competition arises between
the subject and object in Kaqchikel, one of them must be real-
ized away from the other. Since the object usually follows the
verb in Kaqchikel, the increase of competition would lead to
the decrease of VOS word order. Kubo et al. conducted two
picture description experiments to verify this prediction. In the
first experiment, the animacy of the patient noun was manipu-
lated (human, animal, inanimate object) such that similarity be-
tween the agent (human) and patient varied among conditions.
The results showed that VOS sentences were produced more
often with an inanimate patient than with an animal or human
patient, as predicted by similarity-based competition. In the sec-
ond experiment, the researchers examined the effect of an agree-
ment morpheme on the verb by changing the number of the
object noun. The results replicated the overall patterns of the
first experiment. That is, VOS sentences were produced more
often with an inanimate patient than with a human patient, even
when the number of the subject was different from the number
of the object. This indicates that ambiguity resolution is not the
most influential factor of the choice of sentence pattern in
Kaqchikel. Putting the results together, native Kaqchikel speak-
ers seem to be sensitive to the competition caused by the simi-
larity of noun concepts involved in an event described in the
sentence. Native Kaqchikel speakers select the sentence pattern
in order to resolve competition between nouns with similar
concepts.
Conclusion
In Kaqchikel Maya, VOS word order is more frequently em-
ployed when the object is inanimate than when it is animate.
The results of the listening comprehension experiment reported
here show that VOS is processed faster than SVO regardless of
the animacy of the object. This suggests that the processing
load is not significantly affected by the animacy of the object in
Kaqchikel.
Acknowledgements
We are grateful to Yoshiho Yasugi, Juan Esteban Ajsivinac
Sian, and Lolmay Pedro Oscar García Mátzar for their invalu-
able support for our research in Guatemala. We would also like
to thank the research participants. The work for the present
article was partially supported by the Japan Society for the
Promotion of Science under Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Re-
search (S) (No. 22222001, PI: Masatoshi Koizumi).
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Appendix
The followings are representative examples excerpted from
the 80 semantically natural, grammatical transitive Kaqchikel
sentences (target stimuli) and their English translations. They
are presented in the word order of VOS in this Appendix.
1) Sentences with a plural inanimate object and a singular
animate subject:
a) X-e-ru-pïs ri taq lej
CP-B3PL-A3SG-wrap DET PM tortilla
ri ch’utitata’
DET uncle
“The uncle wrapped the tortillas.”
b) X-e-ru-nïm ri taq wuj
CP-B3PL-A3SG-push DET PM book
ri malka’n.
DET widow
“The widow pushed the books.”
2) Sentences with a singular inanimate object and a plural
animate subject:
a) X-
 -ki-jiq’aj ri jub’ül pom
CP-B3SG-A3PL-breath DET fragrant incense
ri taq ajawa’.
DET PM man
“The men breathed the fragrant incense.”
b) X-
 -ki-chäq ri chäq’ tz’o’
CP-B3SG-A3PL-grind DET mature boiled corn
ri taq atita’
DET PM grandmothe
r
“The grandmothers grinded the mature boiled corn.”
3) Sentences with a plural animate object and a singular ani-
mate subject:
a) X-e-ru-kajij ri taq yuqüy b’aq
CP-B3PL-A3SG-annoy DET PM bone-setter
ri cholonel.
DET speaker
“The speaker annoyed the bone-setters.”
b) X-e-ru-q’etej ri taq rach’alal
CP-B3PL-A3SG-embrace DET PM family
ri b’iyinel
DET walker
“The walker embraced the families.”
4) Sentences with a singular animate object and a plural ani-
mate subject:
a) X-  -ki-köl ri achijilom ri taq ixjayilom
CP-B3SG-A3PL-save DET husband DET PM wife
“The wives saved the husband.”
b) X-  -ki-k’uxlaj ri kib’aluk
CP-B3SG-A3PL-recall DET brother-in-law
ri taq rijitaq
DET PM elderly
“The elderlies recalled the brother-in-law.”