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Traditionally, due to the availability of technology, psycholinguistic research has focused mainly on Western languages. However, this focus has recently shifted towards a more diverse range of languages, whose structures often throw into question many previous assumptions in syntactic theory and language processing. Based on a case study in field-based comparative psycholinguistics, this pioneering book is the first to explore the neurocognition of endangered 'object-before-subject' languages, such as Kaqchikel and Seediq. It draws on a range of methods - including linguistic fieldwork, theoretical linguistic analysis, corpus research, questionnaire surveys, behavioural experiments, eye tracking, event-related brain potentials, functional magnetic resonance imaging, and near-infrared spectroscopy – to consider preferred constituent orders in both language and thought, examining comprehension as well as production. In doing so, it highlights the importance of field-based cross-linguistic cognitive neuroscientific research in uncovering universal and language-particular aspects of the human language faculty, and the interaction between language and thought.
This chapter discusses the role of experimental syntax in the construction of an integrated cognitive science of language. It presents a view of syntactic theory as a computational level description of a part of the human language faculty. The first major obstacle to the construction of an integrated theory of language, the black box problem, presents a framework for investigating the empirical contribution of experimental syntax, and second major obstacle presents a framework for understanding the historical and sociological context of recent investigations of experimental syntax. The chapter examines how can experimental syntax help establish confidence in the acceptability judgments reported in the syntactic literature. It reviews two ways in which experimental syntax has added to the understanding of the nature of syntactic theory: (i) testing reductionist claims about the correct locus of acceptability judgment effects, and (ii) examining the complex theoretical issues surrounding the interpretation of continuous acceptability judgments.
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