Researchers found that speakers of subject-verb-object languages — “Bill eats cake” — reverted to a subject-object-verb form when asked to communicate with their hands, which implies that the roots of language run deeper than speech:
Goldin-Meadow’s team asked forty people — ten speakers apiece of English, Mandarin Chinese and Spanish, each of which follows the SVO order, and ten speakers of Turkish, which follows an SOV order — to describe a series of simple actions, such as a girl turning a knob, with gestures.Regardless of their native language, the subjects almost universally preceded object with verb: girl knob turns.
“We expected that the language they spoke would influence the language of their gestures, but it didn’t,” said Goldin-Meadow.
To test whether the subjects used subject-object-verb as a communicative strategy, they were given a series of illustrated transparencies, each depicting one element of a scene, and told that order was irrelevant: the final layered montage would look the same regardless of its assembly. The subjects still put object before verb.
“It almost speaks to the independence of language from thought,” said Goldin-Meadow.