Is there a word order that is more natural for the brain development?

Question

I know this is a totally subjective experience, and it doesn't tell much, but I have several children, and they all used the verb first when learning how to combine words. Their sentences looked like "fallen bottle" for "the bottle has just fallen" or "eat chocolate Bob" for "Bob is eating chocolate". They still did that months after beginning to combine words. What is even more interesting, is that they had different way to speak: some of them were using prepositions, other articles, other neither, etc. but the verbs first was a constant.

They have never been exposed to languages with verb first, though. As far as I can tell, they were exposed to SVO languages only (from different families) during the language acquisition phase. Furthermore, if I believe Wikipedia, the languages with verb first are uncommon.

So this led me to ask myself these questions: is there a word order which is more natural to toddlers? If that is the case, why do languages not match that order?

Answer 1

Word order

SOV or SVO

Italian SOV

Summary of the papers:

1. Animate-first principle: Animate before inanimate. Subjects are more likely to be animate than objects.
2. Theme-first principle: We tend to state the theme first as it comes to mind more easily. Usually the speaker/ listener is more familiar with the theme (old information) and when it comes first, the information flow is smoother.
3. Object-Verb bonding

These principles do an excellent job of explaining the observed word order frequencies: the majority of languages are SOV and SVO.

4. Uniform Information Density Principle (UID): We tend to keep the information density of utterance uniform. SVO has a more uniform density than SOV. (In SOV order, O has the highest surprisal. When S and O are known, the verbs are limited to a small range in many cases. In Japanese the verbs are sometimes skipped because it is too obvious. eg. I __ the housework/ I __ the apple.) According to the paper, there are much more cases of languages changing from SOV to SVO than vice versa and when a language becomes SVO, it is very stable and seldom change to SOV. So the paper suggested that long time ago there were more SOV languages and SOV is more preferred when languages are still in a rudimentary state and no stable lexicon is available.

5. Languages do not have an SVO word order usually have an alternative SVO word order (Greenberg, 1963). The word order of languages change because the alternative order is used more and more frequently and finally the alternative order becomes the dominant order. This happened in Arabic, Romance languages and Germanic languages.

6. Dependency length: as OV are closely bonded, many order has a larger dependency length than SVO. SOV has a larger dependency length (and working memory) than SVO in many complex sentences (eg. Embedded sentences/ relative clause) in SOV order is very clumsy compared to SVO. Many SOV languages has alternative OSV/ SVO when NP/ the relative clause (usually it is the object) is too long (eg. in Japanese- OSV, in Georgian- SVO).

eg. Ben said that Mary met the woman who gave John some bread. in SOV: Ben Mary John some bread gave the woman met that said (you wait til the end and know Ben SAID that)/ Ben Mary the woman gave some bread to John met said ("met" and "the woman" are separate, OV bonding)

7. SVO and OVS are the best order to naturally placing O and S at the opposite end in the view of information transmission. In case there is noise, they are the best to preserve the information. According to Greenberg, SOV almost always has a case system. In other word orders that placing S and O on the same side, many have at least particles to tell S from O. See my answer in Maori and Hawaiian.

VSO

When the case system is lost, SVO is the best word order that require no case system to tell S apart from O. When changing from SVO to VSO/ SOV, in case the language has no case system, usually it should build one.

(Languages usually change word order step by step, you don't jump from SVO to OSV which involve two steps SVO--> SOV-->OSV)

8. However, SOV is preferred in children and when people do not have a fixed lexicon to communicate. The main reason is S and O are more readily retrieved than V. "entities are cognitively more basic and less relational than actions, which might lead participants to highlight entities involved in an action before focusing on the action itself". Some experiments confirm that people without common language tends to communicate with signs in the order or SOV instead of SVO. The conclusion must therefore be that different groups of speakers, such as deaf children and participants with different native languages in experiments, independently of each other tend to use an SOV word order in a context in which a new language emerges. This observation suggest that an SOV word order seems to be a natural way to express transitive events in newly emerging languages. But when ideas become complex (look at my Ben Mary woman example above), SVO is preferred.

According to the paper, the majority of sign languages that have developed from home sign starts out with an SOV word order, I wonder if SOV is more common in sign languages.

9. Creoles are mostly SVO as they are mostly based on Indo-European languages.