Psycholinguistic research has shown that the influence of abstract syntactic knowledge on performance is shaped by particular sentences that have been experienced. To explore this idea, the authors applied a connectionist model of sentence production to the development and use of abstract syntax. The model makes use of (a) error-based learning to acquire and adapt sequencing mechanisms and (b) meaning-form mappings to derive syntactic representations. The model is able to account for most of what is known about structural priming in adult speakers, as well as key findings in preferential looking and elicited production studies of language acquisition. The model suggests how abstract knowledge and concrete experience are balanced in the development and use of syntax.

To study the time course of sentence formulation, we monitored the eye movements of speakers as they described simple events. The similarity between speakers' initial eye movements and those of observers performing a non-verbal event comprehension task suggested that response-relevant information was rapidly extracted from scenes, allowing speakers to select grammatical subjects based on comprehended events rather than visual salience. When speaking extemporaneously, speakers began fixating pictured elements less than a second before naming them within their descriptions, consistent with incremental lexical encoding. Eye movements anticipated the order of mention despite changes in picture orientation, in who-did-what-to-whom, and in sentence structure. The results support Wundt's theory of sentence production.From a psychological point of view, the sentence is both a simultaneous and a sequential structure. It is simultaneous because at each moment it is present in conscious-ness as a totality even though individual subordinate elements may occasionally disappear from it. It is sequential because the configuration changes from moment to moment in its cognitive condition as individual constituents move into the focus of attention and out again one after the other (Wundt, 1900(Wundt, /1970).Wundt's ideas about sentence production were at the center of an epic debate between a psychologist, Wundt himself, and the linguist Hermann Paul about the nature of language and its relation to thought. The claim that sentence production consists of a wholistic conceptualization followed by the sequential expression of linguistic constituents came in direct reaction to Paul's contention (1886/1970) that sentences are the sums of their parts, originating in sequential associations among individual concepts that are outwardly manifested as a series of words (see Blumenthal, 1970, for review). Wundt's arguments about sentences re-emerged at mid-century in Lashley's (1951) classic analysis of serial order in behavior, once again in reaction to associative accounts of sequenced action.The longevity of the issues notwithstanding, we know little more than Wundt and Lashley did about the conceptual precursors of meaningful connected speech. Although considerable progress has been made in tracing the internal structure of the language production system and the cognitive and neurophysiological details of single-word production (Dell, Schwartz,

The subjects and verbs of English sentences agree in number. This superficially simple syntactic operation is regularly implemented by speakers, but occasionally derails in sentences such as The cost of the improvements have not yet been estimated. We examined whether the incidence of such errors was related to the presence of subject-like semantic features in the immediate preverbal nouns, in light of current questions about the semantic versus syntactic nature of sentence subjects and the interactivity of language processing. In three experiments, speakers completed sentence fragments designed to elicit erroneous agreement. We varied the number and animacy of the head noun and the immediate preverbal (local) noun, as well as the amount of material separating the head noun from the verb. The plurality of the local noun phrase had a large and reliable effect on the incidence of agreement errors, but neither its animacy nor its length affected their occurrence. The latter findings suggest, respectively, that the semantic features of sentence subjects are of minimal relevance to the syntactic and morphological processes that implement agreement, and that agreement features are specified at a point in processing where the eventual length of sentential constituents has little effect on syntactic planning. Both results follow naturally from explanations of language production that emphasize the segregation of sentence formulation processes into relatively autonomous components.

The sentence frames formed during language production are commonly and rather uncontroversially represented as hierarchical constituent structures. There is less accord about whether the frames are pure structural configurations or limnings of meaning. We examined these alternatives with a sentence priming paradigm in which the primes and targets shared phrase structures and event structures, or only phrase structures. The results of the first and second experiments indicated that event-structure changes had no impact on a reliable tendency to replicate the phrase structures of the primes within sentence targets. The last experiment showed that this tendency could not be attributed to metrical or to closed-class lexical similarities. The implication is that sentence frames are not identifiable with metrical or conceptual information, but are comparatively independent syntactic representations.

Structural priming in language production is a tendency to recreate a recently uttered syntactic structure in different words. This tendency can be seen independent of specific lexical items, thematic roles, or word sequences. Two alternative proposals about the mechanism behind structural priming include (a) short-term activation from a memory representation of a priming structure and (b) longer term adaptation within the cognitive mechanisms for creating sentences, as a form of procedural learning. Two experiments evaluated these hypotheses, focusing on the persistence of structural priming. Both experiments yielded priming that endured beyond adjacent sentences, persisting over 2 intervening sentences in Experiment 1 and over 10 in Experiment 2. Although memory may have short-term consequences for some components of this kind of priming, the persisting effects are more compatible with a learning account than a transient memory account.

Grammatical agreement flags the parts of sentences that belong together regardless of whether the parts appear together. In English, the major agreement controller is the sentence subject, the major agreement targets are verbs and pronouns, and the major agreement category is number. The authors expand an account of number agreement whose tenets are that pronouns acquire number lexically, whereas verbs acquire it syntactically but with similar contributions from number meaning and from the number morphology of agreement controllers. These tenets were instantiated in a model using existing verb agreement data. The model was then fit to a new, more extensive set of verb data and tested with a parallel set of pronoun data. The theory was supported by the model's outcomes. The results have implications for the integration of words and structures, for the workings of agreement categories, and for the nature of the transition from thought to language.

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The distinction between underlying and superficial linguistic structure is a staple of modern cognitive psychology. Despite increasingly diverse conceptions of syntactic relations in linguistic theory, the received view in psycholinguistics has remained one in which the entities assigned to underlying relations may assume different surface relations. The present article examines this view in the context of language production and reviews evidence that the disposition to bind animate entities to the surface subject relation is a basic feature of language use, suggesting that mappings from conceptual categories to syntactic relations form a main support of the bridge from conception to language. Proceeding on this assumption, the article also evaluates competing accounts of the mapping process in production. The results argue against syntactic relation-changing operations, but favor a division between meaning- and form-related mechanisms.