Look Where my Language Tells You to Look! Tzeltal Word Order Determines Eye Gaze

To what extent does the language we speak influence how we plan our utterances? Eye tracking evidence from Tzeltal, a Mayan language, reveals that the uptake of visual information in pictures of simple events is affected by the word order of the to-be-uttered sentence. This indicates that the time course of sentence formulation may be mediated by language-specific grammatical properties. The freer word order of Tzeltal, as compared with English, allows us to see this difference.