Chapter 9 discusses the SO preference observed in the domain of language production, i.e., that sentences with SO orders are more frequently produced than sentences with OS orders in many languages. Although the language production mechanism is often assumed to be universal, the range of languages investigated so far is typologically quite limited. We conducted a sentence production experiment with a picture description task to clarify word order selection in Kaqchikel. In this experiment, participants verbally described the target pictures with a simple sentence. Speakers of Kaqchikel had a general preference for producing the SVO order over the VOS order. This is consistent with the prediction of the UCV, but not with that of the IGV. Therefore, the SO word order might be a universal preference in sentence production, which is in line with the results of previous studies.

Chapter 7 turns our attention to basic word order in language and natural order of thought. In his seminal work, Greenberg (1963) observed that a vast majority of the world’s languages have one of the SO word orders as their basic word order. It is interesting to note that the distribution is heavily biased even among the three SO orders, with SOV being the most frequent, which indicates that SOV has some special status among the six possible word orders in some sense. Why should this be the case? To address this question, Goldin-Meadow et al. (2008) showed short animations depicting transitive events (e.g., a girl twisting a knob) to speakers of four languages (Chinese, English, Spanish [all SVO], and Turkish [SOV]). The participants were then asked to describe the depicted events by using only their hands, i.e., with gestures. The speakers of all four languages dominantly used the agent–patient–action order in their gestures, regardless of the basic word order of their languages. Goldin-Meadow et al. (2008: 9167) took these results to suggest that the agent–patient–action order reflects the natural sequencing of an event representation and that developing languages use it as the default pattern, thus displaying an SOV word order.