Conceptual influences on word order and voice in sentence production: Evidence from Japanese

Tanaka, Mitsuya; Branigan, Holly P.; McLean, Janet F.; Pickering, Martin J.

doi:10.1016/j.jml.2011.04.009

Cited by 86 publications

(105 citation statements)

References 27 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…This result is consistent with other work showing that speakers tend to describe animate and inanimate entities differently in main clauses (e.g., Bock & Warren, 1985;Christianson & F. Ferreira, 2005;F. Ferreira, 1994;Tanaka et al, 2011). We further found an effect of language.…”

Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 93%

“…Despite typological differences between English and Japanese and Korean, in all three languages, speakers tended to use more passive productions when describing animate rather than inanimate targets. This is consistent with the empirical findings of Tanaka et al, (2011) as well as linguistic analyses (Oshima, 2006) that suggest that even in languages with more fluid word order, speakers more often produce passive utterances with animate than inanimate subject nouns. Though this effect of animacy was robust in all three languages, the absolute number of active and passive utterances varied across languages.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 90%

“…For example, conceptual representations of animate entities are thought to be more accessible and consequently retrieved from long term memory more quickly than representations of inanimate entities, with the consequence that animate entities tend to be mentioned earlier in utterances than inanimate entities (e.g., Bock & Warren, 1985), often interpreted as a direct link between conceptual accessibility and word order (for review see Jaeger & Norcliffe, 2009;Tanaka, Branigan, McLean, & Pickering, 2011). Externally cued entities also seem to affect the ease with which entities are encoded and articulated, with cued entities generally taking more prominent positions, or positions earlier in the sentence (Gleitman, January, Nappa & Trueswell, 2007;Myachykov & Tomblin, 2008; c.f., Konopka & Meyer, 2014;Myachykov, Garrod & Scheepers, 2010).…”

Section: Multiple Forces Shaping Production Choicesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We investigated these factors in English, a language with limited word order flexibility that is strongly affected by noun animacy (Bock & Warren, 1985;F. Ferreira, 1994, McDonald, Bock & Kelley, 1993, Japanese, a language with flexible word order for which word order alternatives (often called scrambling) and passive use both seem to be viable options (Tanaka et al, 2011), and Korean, which is syntactically similar to Japanese in both word order and the availability of scrambled alternatives but with the event-structure link (adversity and passives) noted above. We compared active and passive production rates in two different clause types: main clauses, where (unlike English) Japanese and Korean allow word order variation, and relative clauses, where (like English) Japanese and Korean do not allow word order variation.…”

Section: Multiple Forces Shaping Production Choicesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Although the basic word order in Japanese and Korean may be SOV, these languages also have an alternative scrambled main clause word order in which the object precedes the subject in an OSV order. Evidence from Japanese suggests that speakers tend to produce sentences with a scrambled word in order to place more accessible nouns, such as animate or discourse-given words, earlier in the utterance (V. Ferreira & Yoshita, 2003;Kondo & Yamashita, 2011;Tanaka et al, 2011, Yamashita, 2002, which is also accomplished by producing a passive. Most relevant to the current studies, scrambling allows the grammatical role assignment and word order of an utterance to vary independently, which may have implications for the underlying planning processes of these utterances.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 4 more Smart Citations

Language Specific and Language General Motivations of Production Choices: A Multi-Clause and Multi-Language Investigation

Montag

Matsuki

Kim

et al. 2017

Collabra: Psychology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Cross-linguistic studies allow for analyses that would be impossible in a single language. To better understand the factors that underlie sentence production, we investigated production choices in main and relative clause production tasks in three languages: English, Japanese and Korean. The effects of both non-linguistic attributes (such as conceptual animacy) and language specific properties (such as word order) were investigated. Japanese and Korean are structurally similar to each other but different from English, which allowed for an investigation of the production consequences of non-linguistic attributes in different typological or word order contexts (when Japanese and Korean speakers make similar production choices that are unlike those of English speakers), as well as production choices that differ despite typological similarity (when Japanese and Korean speakers make different choices). Speakers of all three languages produced more passive utterances when describing animate entities, but the overall rate of passives varied by task and language. Further, the sets of items that were most likely to elicit passives varied by language, with Japanese and Korean speakers more likely to produce passives when patients were adversely affected by the depicted event. These results suggest a number of factors that contribute to language production choices across three languages, and how general cognitive constraints on sentence production may interact with the structure of a specific language.Keywords: Sentence production; relative clauses; passives; cross-linguistic analysis; Japanese; Korean An English speaker in a coffee shop, desiring coffee, might say, "A coffee," or "I'll take coffee, a small one, please," or "May I have a small?" Even in this highly constrained context, many different utterances can convey the speaker's message. This flexibility of language production, and speakers' abilities to navigate the high number of lexical and syntactic options to converge on a single utterance form, are central features of the production process and have become important topics of research. The research presented here addresses these issues by comparing production across three different languages and two different sentence constructions. This approach provides a detailed picture of how production flexibility-the availability of alternative syntactic and lexical options to convey a message-can vary across language and message, and how these factors shape speakers' implicit choices of words and sentence structures, providing insight into how language production processes settle on an utterance plan over alternative possibilities. Multiple Forces Shaping Production ChoicesLanguage production researchers have long recognized that the properties of both words and sentence structures affect producers' implicit utterance choices. Recently, several researchers have aimed to characterize a range of these effects by contrasting two means by which speakers converge on a single string of to-be-articulated words. Sentence const...

show abstract

Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 93%

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 90%