Processing effort is a poor predictor of cross-linguistic word order frequency
Some have argued that word orders which are more difficult to process should be rarer cross-linguistically. Our current study fails to replicate the results of Maurits, Navarro, and Perfors (2010), who used an entropy-based Uniform Information Density (UID) measure to moderately predict the Greenbergian typology of transitive word orders. We additionally report an inability of three measures of processing difficulty {---} entropy-based UID, surprisal-based UID, and pointwise mutual information {---} to correctly predict the correct typological distribution, using transitive constructions from 20 languages in the Universal Dependencies project (version 2.5). However, our conclusions are limited by data sparsity.
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