David Gil has argued that Riau Indonesian (Sumatra. Indonesia) has no syntax, or at least not much. This controversial analysis undermines all current models of grammar, especially those describing acquisition and on-line processing. To test the strength of this analysis, we computed the information gain holding between unigram and bigram models of regular and randomized samples of English and Riau Indonesian. English samples were included as a relatively syntax-heavy baseline. We then correlated information gain values with language (English vs. Riau Indonesian), text type (original vs. randomized), and their interaction within a linear mixed-effects regression. The results suggest (a) that English and Riau Indonesian have the same amount of bigram informativity and (b) that randomization eliminates this effect in both languages. These findings do not support Gil’s syntax-free analysis; rather, they point to some kind of productive constraints on Riau Indonesian word order

Previous research on morphological processing suggests that the probability distribution of a word across its inflected variants influences the recognition of that word. Recently, similar effects have been reported for relations between prepositions and definite-noun-phrase heads in English trigrams (e.g., in the bucket). In the present study, we test whether both effects could be accounted for in terms of string proximity and/or semantic similarity alone, or whether the findings for English trigrams should be attributed to syntactic paradigm effects. We ‘fake’ a case system for English using syntactic positions and prepositions as proxies for the relational meanings expressed inflectionally in other languages. Based on these syntactic factors, we define a syntactic inflectional entropy to parallel the morphological entropy measures used in prior studies. We found that this new measure correlates negatively with visual lexical decision RTs. However, unlike prior studies, we did not find a semantic priming effect between nouns with similar distributions in our paradigmatic vectors. This finding suggests that abstract constructional distributions facilitate lexical access while obscuring semantic relations between similarly distributed words