Word Automaticity of Tree Automatic Scattered Linear Orderings Is Decidable

A tree automatic structure is a structure whose domain can be encoded by a regular tree language such that each relation is recognisable by a finite automaton processing tuples of trees synchronously. Words can be regarded as specific simple trees and a structure is word automatic if it is encodable using only these trees. The question naturally arises whether a given tree automatic structure is already word automatic. We prove that this problem is decidable for tree automatic scattered linear orderings. Moreover, we show that in case of a positive answer a word automatic presentation is computable from the tree automatic presentation.