Free Word Order and Scrambling in Language Acquisition

Introduction

"Free word order" languages are those in which the structure of a sentence is constructed loosely with respect to the placement of nouns and verbs. There are many varied explanations and theories surrounding the structure — or lack of structure — in free word order languages. Grammatical encoding has perhaps never been more relevant than it is today, given that computer-generated language translation is used frequently in everyday life. Communication barriers are clearly evident in confused exchanges, particularly between English — with its formally structured subject-verb-object sentences — and languages such as Korean and Japanese, both of which are free word order languages.

Thorne (2000) notes in his work "Second Language Acquisition Theory and the Truths About Relativity" that a strong research tradition exists within anthropology, sociology, and linguistics that illustrates the contextual relativity of semantic values. He calls for reappraising these values in relation to second language acquisition, moving from "an understanding of the language learned as context-independent lexical and grammatical meaning (present in formal theories of language and communication), to an acknowledgment of the relative and context-contingent nature of language-in-use" (Thorne, 2000).

Thorne remarks that when socio-cultural theory is examined from the perspective of linguistics, anthropology, sociology, psychology, and communications theory as they pertain to second and foreign language learning, certain themes emerge:

(1) the interdependence between language and conceptual development; (2) language as the principal sign system carrying socio-historical-cultural presence into the moment; (3) language as a primary resource through which people interactively construct social reality; and (4) the reproduction of individual and community practices due in part to the inertia of language-constructed social worlds (Thorne, 2000).

Socio-Cultural Formation of Speech and Language

Vygotsky believed that the human brain is "socially constituted through mediation via semiotic systems," meaning specifically that different languages are expressions of socio-historical processes existing in the life of the individual. To Vygotsky, speech is first "social" and is followed by internalized or "inner" speech — referred to as "egocentric" speech. Not only do considerable differences exist between the world's languages, but "language-specific world-framing" differences also exist (Thorne, 2000). In attempting to learn a language, adults must specifically contend with "reduced syntax and vocabulary, no fixed order of words, with considerable variation from one speaker to another; and used purely as a language of communication" (Mason, n.d.).

Noam Chomsky held that children are born with an innate knowledge — or set of rules — concerning language, which he called "Universal Grammar." Chomsky argued that children are exposed to very little correctly formed language: when people speak, they constantly interrupt themselves, change their minds, make slips of the tongue, and so on, yet children manage to learn their language all the same. This claim is usually referred to as the "Argument from Poverty of the Stimulus." Children do not simply copy the language they hear around them; they deduce rules from it, which they can then use to produce sentences they have never heard before. They do not learn a repertoire of phrases and sayings, as the behaviorists believe, but a grammar that generates an infinity of new sentences (Mason, n.d.).

Bailyn (n.d.) states in the work "Word Order and Minimalism" that "scrambling is the cover term for the transformation that derives non-canonical word order patterns in free word order languages such as Japanese, Russian, German, Hindi, and others." In these languages, constituents appear in a variety of surface orders without changing the core meaning of the sentence (Bailyn, n.d.).

Previous Study in Language Acquisition and Word Order Differentiation

Among the first to study language acquisition in cross-linguistic context were Gopnik and Choi (1991), followed by Gopnik and Meltzoff (1993). The studies of Gopnik and Choi (1991) demonstrate "specific correspondence between language-culture environment and conceptual development" (Thorne, 2000). Thorne states that 75% of all languages in the world follow a Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) structure, which includes English, French, and Vietnamese, while others follow a Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) structure, which includes Japanese and Korean. Other structures include VOS and OSV. Children unconsciously recognize different language structures and make adjustments for them (Thorne, 2000). The studies of Gopnik and Choi (1991) and Gopnik and Meltzoff (1993) demonstrated that the acquisition of Korean and Japanese by children was greatly affected by the culture-language environment, and that specific correlations exist between grammatical characteristics of these languages and domain-specific developmental progress.

The Japanese and Korean languages are "verb-salient" languages, while English is a "noun-salient" language. Japanese and Korean children produced verb morphology earlier than children who spoke English; however, Korean and Japanese-speaking children were "significantly delayed in performance concerning categorization tasks" (Thorne, 2000).

The work of Yamakita and Chang entitled "Sentence Production in Japanese" states that in order to communicate verbally, there is a requirement for the production of "a grammatical sequence of words — that is, a sentence that conveys a meaning. The meaning activates syntactic, morphological, and lexical representations, which ensure the production of a grammatical sentence" (n.d.). This process is complex because the speaker must "select elements that are appropriate for the meaning and find a way to sequence these elements in a language-appropriate way" (n.d.). In explaining precisely how a speaker produces sentences, an architecture for sentence production has been proposed (Bock, 1995; Bock & Levelt, 1994; Garrett, 1998; Levelt, 1989) with three main components:

(1) the message — representing the meaning of a sentence; (2) the grammatical component — responsible for the generation of word sequences; and (3) the physiological component — which retrieves the content of words from the lexicon (Chang and Yamakita, 2006).

The grammatical characteristics of the Japanese language differ from English in several syntactic dimensions (Chang and Yamakita, 2006). Japanese utilizes scrambling and is therefore a relatively free word order language. Specific differences include: (1) Japanese uses particles for marking each phrase in terms of its grammatical function within the sentence, allowing interchange of phrases within the sentence without changing the function of the phrase — phrases trade places through scrambling or "word permutation"; (2) verbs in Japanese are found at the clause ending; and (3) arguments may be omitted within the framework of Japanese (Chang and Yamakita, 2006).