Formal linguists and psycholinguists start with the standard assumption that all human brains operate according to the same principles, and that all human language and human sentence processing must adhere to these principles, regardless of the surface characteristics of any given language. Yet the vast majority of psycholinguistic research (on both production and comprehension) that has been conducted has focused on a tiny number of the world's languages. With only a few exceptions, all of the languages have been typologically homogeneous and therefore syntactically similar. The proposed research seeks primarily to extend psycholinguistic research to the Odawa language, a Native American language closely related to Ojibwa and other Algonquian languages and spoken in southern Ontario, Canada. Odawa is typologically and syntactically very different from any language ever investigated by psycholinguists and thus offers a totally new perspective on the various current and competing theories of human sentence processing.
Odawa is often referred to as a nonconfigurational language due to its extremely free word order in independent clauses. Any transitive sentence consisting of two noun phrase arguments and a verb can occur grammatically in any of the six possible word orders. Yet this word order is not facilitated by a rich, conventional case system of the sort observed in languages that exhibit certain degrees of word order freedom and which have been studied by psycholinguists (e.g., German, Japanese). This degree of word order freedom is something that is not taken into consideration in any current model of sentence production or comprehension.
The Student Investigator has the unprecedented opportunity to combine his training in formal syntax, psycholinguistics, and the Odawa language to perform a large number of production and comprehension experiments in the town of Wikwemikong, Ontario, Canada, where approximately 50% of the 7,000 residents are still native speakers of the language. The production experiments will be conducted to assess baseline preferences for various structural alternatives, and to determine whether the preferences can be changed with various priming manipulations. The comprehension experiments will seek to establish temporary ambiguities and then observe the manner and time course of participants' recovery from such ambiguities. Critically, the syntax of Odawa allows key assumptions made by current theories of sentence processing to be critically examined.
