Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Studying the silent gesture of hearing non-signers is a crucial tool for shedding light on natural language phenomena.Previous studies have found that properties of the meanings conveyed in silent gesture can influence word order. Forinstance, participants prefer SOV ordering for extensional events (man carries ball), while for intensional events (in whichthe object is possibly non-existent or dependent on the action; e.g., man thinks of guitar, woman builds house) there isa cross-linguistic preference for SVO (Schouwstra & de Swart, 2014). Eliciting descriptions of the two event types inNicaraguan Sign Language, we found evidence for these lab-documented word order preferences in an emergent naturallanguage: objects precede verbs for extensional events, but follow verbs for intensional events. However, this wordorder pattern is manifested differently in Nicaraguan Sign (the result only surfaced in a sub-string analysis), because thepreference interacts with NSLs language-internal constraint for verb-finalness.