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Abstract:
Various theories of language production make
different assumptions about how much syntactic information is
buffered before and during articulation. While some
evidence supports theories maintaining that syntactic planning
occurs in small, phrasal chunks (Schriefers, Teurel &
Meinhausen, 1998; Smith & Wheeldon, 2001), other evidence
shows that syntactic planning takes place over larger domains
(Ferreira & Swets, 2002; Meyer, 1996). It has also been
argued recently that syntactic planning is not a costly process
once articulation has begun (Smith & Wheeldon, 2001).
However, most of the above studies have investigated the planning
of relatively simple structures. The goal of the present
study was to test these different assumptions of incremental
syntactic planning with a task that would involve the production
of complex structures --- English relative clause sentences in
which resumptive pronouns are uttered behind wh-island boundaries
(see Example 1, below).
The experiment utilized a task which required
English speakers to describe, with full sentences, a picture
array that included partial descriptions. We compared
initiation times to begin articulation and utterance duration
measures of utterances like Example 1, below, with two other
syntactic conditions. In one condition, the surface form of
the target sentence was similar (Example 2, below). A
condition with a cross-clausal dependency between a wh-element
and its trace that did not have a wh-island boundary was also
included (Example 3, below). The hypothesis that syntactic
planning operates in sub-clausal or phrasal increments would
predict that, because each sentence begins with the same clause,
no effects of initiation time should be observed.
In fact, the target sentences did not reveal
initiation time effects between conditions. However,
effects of the late-arising syntactic complexity were observed on
speech durations from regions early on in the sentences.
Specifically, when a sentence with a wh-island resumptive pronoun
was uttered, more time was spent uttering both the head noun
("donkey", below) and the subsequent relative pronoun ("that")
(both of which are separated by at least a clause from the source
of the wh-island complexity), compared with the two control
conditions. These findings are not consistent with either
the phrasally incremental hypothesis or the hypothesis that
syntactic planning is cost-free once articulation has
begun. The findings are more consistent with theories of
production that assume less incremental syntactic planning
(Ferreira, 2000).
Example target sentences
(1) This is a donkey that I don't know where it
lives.
(2) This is a donkey that doesn't know where it
lives.
(3) This is a donkey that I didn't say lives in
Brazil.
References
Ferreira, F. (2000). Syntax in language
production: An approach using tree-adjoining grammars. In
L. Wheeldon (Ed.), Aspects of Language Production.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Ferreira, F., & Swets, B. (2002). How
incremental is language production? Evidence from the production
of utterances requiring the computation of arithmetic sums.
Journal of Memory & Language, 46, 57-84.
Meyer, A.S. (1996). Lexical access in phrase
and sentence production: Results from picture-word interference
experiments. Journal of Memory & Language, 35,
477-496.
Schriefers, H., Teruel, E., & Meinhausen, R.
M. (1998). Producing simple sentences: Results from
picture-word interference experiments. Journal of Memory
& Language, 39, 609-632.
Smith, M. & Wheeldon, L. (2001).
Syntactic priming in spoken sentence production: An online
study. Cognition, 78, 123-164.
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