Articulation rate: Effects of age, fluency, and syntactic structure

Are There Really Syntactic Complexity Effects in Sentence Production? A Reply to Scontras et al. (2015)

“…Second, contrary to the claim that long-distance dependencies tax working memory, children, who presumably have lower working memory capacity than adults, produce the long dependency object-extractions (1b) at a higher proportion than adults do (Montag & MacDonald, 2015). McKee, McDaniel, Garrett, Lozoraitis, and Mutterperl (2013) found that adults and older children produce relative clauses faster than comparable sections of simple sentences, inconsistent with the idea that dependency distance affects utterance durations. Third, Diessel and Tomasello (2005) measured the accuracy of children's production of relative clauses with a variety of dependency distances (the [1a-b] types and others) and concluded that dependency distance did not predict children's production performance.…”