Some Word-Order Effects in Serbo-Croat

In the Serbo-Croatian language, the relative order of subject (S), verb (V), and object (O) is flexible. All six of the permutations of those elements have identical words, meaning, and voice, and all six are grammatically acceptable. Nonetheless, SVO is the dominant form. The psychological reality of this dominance was assessed in three tasks. SVO was associated with the shortest latencies (and SO forms in general were faster than OS forms) when subjects were asked to evaluate the plausibility of a sentence (Experiment 1) or to initiate an utterance (Experiment 2). This advantage did not obtain in lexical decision (Experiments 3 and 4). Results are discussed in the context of linguistic universals of word order and Forster's (1979) model of the language processor.