Knowledge of the OV parameter setting at 19 months: Evidence from Hindi–Urdu

• With the eye-tracking technique we test comprehension of word order in 19-month-olds.
• Our results with the acquisition of OV are similar to previous results on VO in French.
• Children exposed to Hindi–Urdu have set the OV parameter at least at 19 months of age.

Although there is extensive evidence for early parameter setting in the syntactic productions of young children, much less is known about parameter setting before production starts. Franck et al. (2011) showed, for the first time, sensitivity to the VO/OV parameter at 19 months of age in children exposed to French, a VO language. Their experiment resorted to the combination of the preferential looking paradigm with pseudo-verbs and the weird word order paradigm. Here we report a closely resembling experiment with an OV language, Hindi–Urdu. We tested 20 children aged 19 months and the results show that children can parse the SOV sequences (and consequently show a looking preference for a transitive action) that generated random behaviour in the French experiment, while non-target sequences grant only random gazing behaviour.