身振り手振りで「自然な思考の順番」がわかるとな

• 「英語式語順は、自然な思考の順番に反する」研究結果 - WIRED VISION
• Susan Goldin-Meadow, Wing Chee So, Aslı Özyürek, and Carolyn Mylander, "The natural order of events: How speakers of different languages represent events nonverbally" - Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
• Goldin-Meadow Laboratory
• "Charades reveals a universal sentence structure"（身振り手振りが普遍的な文構造をあきらかに） - New Scientist
• David Beaver, "Charades does not reveal a universal sentence structure"（身振り手振りじゃ普遍的な文構造はわからんよ） - Language Log
• David Beaver, "Charades does not reveal a universal sentence structure II"（身振り手振りじゃ普遍的な文構造はわからんよⅡ） - Language Log

※"Charades does not reveal a universal sentence structure"より引用：

• Uncontroversial observation number 1) Plays tend to start with a list of characters. And when we tell a story, we tend to introduce characters before connecting them. And when we describe pictures verbally or in writing, we tend to describe the objects and characters and then how they relate. ("There's a bear and there's a rabbit and the bear is hugging the rabbit")
• Uncontroversial observation number 2) We tend to give priority to characters that act rather than characters that are acted on. And in casual conversation, stories, and descriptions, we tend to mention more important things before less important things.

So now it turns out that people tend to mime Subjects, then Objects, then Verbs. Of course it is not appropriate to describe the mimes as Subjects, Objects, or Verbs, since they're not part of a language, but let's ignore that. The SOV order observed could perhaps be explained without any reference to syntax: all the characters before the action or relation because of (1); and agents before patients because of (2).

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