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Abstract:
This research examines syntactic planning in production.
Bockand Cutting (1992) showed that number agreement production
fails more often when verbs are separated from subject head nouns
by a prepositional phrase (PP) ("The report of the destructive
fires...") than by a clause ("The report that they destroyed the
fires..."). They proposed that clauses are planned
independently, so that local noun number (on "fires") does not
interfere with number-marking on the head noun ("report") in such
cases. Solomon and Pearlmutter (2001) proposed that
number-agreement error patterns in production depend on degree of
semantic integration between words and phrases. Speakers
completing fragments like "The drawing of/with the flower(s)"
produced a larger error effect in the "of" conditions, suggesting
that the integration relationship between nouns within a phrase
influences planning: More tightly integrated elements (e.g.,
of-PPs) tend to be planned together, and thus properties of such
elements (e.g., grammatical number) will have a greater chance of
interfering with each other.
Solomon and Pearlmutter's (2001) experiments confounded
semantic integration differences with the argument/adjunct
distinction. Two new experiments eliminate this confound by
examining semantic integration effects within adjunct PPs.
Experiment 1 contrasted for-PPs (1a) with accompaniment-PPs (1b),
and Experiment 2 contrasted attribute-PPs (2a) with
accompaniment-PPs (2b). In both experiments, larger error
effects (plural local noun vs. singular local noun) appeared in
the more integrated conditions (for-PPs in Experiment 1;
attribute-PPs in Experiment 2), ruling out an explanation solely
in terms of the argument/adjunct distinction.
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1.
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a.
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The chauffeur for the actor(s)
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b.
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The chauffeur with the
actor(s)
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2.
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a.
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The pizza with the yummy
topping(s)
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b.
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The pizza with the tasty
beverage(s)
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A third experiment directly contrasts the argument/adjunct
distinction with semantic integration, using of-PPs (3a),
relative clauses (RCs; 3b), and full sentence complements (SCs;
3c). Of-PPs showed the largest error effect. SCs, which are
arguments but are not semantically integrated, showed no error
effect; whereas RCs, which are adjuncts but are integrated by
coindexation, showed an intermediate effect. This is the reverse
of what the argument/adjunct distinction must predict to account
for Solomon and Pearlmutter's (2001) results.
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3.
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a.
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The report of the nasty auto
accident(s)
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b.
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The report that described the auto
accident(s)
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c.
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The report that Megan described the
accident(s)
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Finally, we provide data from a semantic integration norming
study in which participants rated how "closely linked" head and
local nouns were within each phrase from Experiments 1-3. These
ratings confirmed the intuitive integration differences and
predicted agreement error rates across plural local noun
conditions, but they could not account for the Experiment 3 of-PP
versus RC error rate difference. This latter result indicates
that a factor like Bock and Cutting's (1992) clause-boundedness
may be needed in addition to semantic integration.
References
Bock, K., & Cutting, J. C. (1992). Regulating mental
energy: Performance units in language production. Journal
of Memory and Language, 31, 99-127.
Solomon, E. S., & Pearlmutter, N. J. (2001). Effects
of linking prepositions in the production of subject-verb
agreement. Paper presented at the 14th CUNY Conference on
Human Sentence Processing, Philadelphia, PA.
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