Horizontal Information Flow in Spoken Sentence Production.

Smith, Mark C.; Wheeldon, Linda

doi:10.1037/0278-7393.30.3.675

Cited by 62 publications

(124 citation statements)

References 52 publications

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“…It has been shown that when semantically related nouns are planned and uttered close to each other, production difficulty increases (Smith & Wheeldon, 2004), possibly because speakers need to inhibit one of the nouns when producing the other noun but later have to retrieve it. MacDonald (2013) argues that this similarity-based interference may influence the choice of utterance form.…”

Section: Why Verb-medial Responses?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Aiming at shorter dependencies: the role of agreement morphology

Ros

Santesteban

Fukumura

et al. 2015

Language, Cognition and Neuroscience

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This study examined word order preferences as a function of phrasal length in Basque. Basque is an OV-language with flexible sentence word order and rich verb agreement. Contrary to the universal short-before-long preference predicted by availability models, Hawkins has argued that short-before-long orders are preferred in VO-languages such as English, whereas long-beforeshort orders are preferred in OV-languages such as Japanese (Hawkins, 2004). However, it is unclear how length affects word order preferences when an OV-language has rich verb agreement and allows postverbal arguments. We found a general long-before-short preference, and a tendency to place the verb in a sentence-medial position when one constituent is long. We argue that since agreement morphology signals the thematic role and case of surrounding phrases, it contributes to speeding up sentence processing. We conclude that morphologically rich languages employ both general adjacency mechanisms and language-specific resources to enhance language efficiency.

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Section: Why Verb-medial Responses?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Aiming at shorter dependencies: the role of agreement morphology

Ros

Santesteban

Fukumura

et al. 2015

Language, Cognition and Neuroscience

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“…The interference effect was stronger in the near than in the middle condition. One account of these semantic interference effects is that the selection of the lemma for the first noun is slowed down by the co-activation of the related second lemma (e.g., Freedman, Martin, & Biegler, 2004;Smith & Wheeldon, 2004). Thus, co-activation of a second lemma was more likely in the near and middle conditions, where the second object could be identified while the first one was fixated upon.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Effects of parallel planning on agreement production

2015

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a b s t r a c t a r t i c l e i n f oAn important issue in current psycholinguistics is how the time course of utterance planning affects the generation of grammatical structures. The current study investigated the influence of parallel activation of the components of complex noun phrases on the generation of subject-verb agreement. Specifically, the lexical interference account (Gillespie & Pearlmutter, 2011b;Solomon & Pearlmutter, 2004) predicts more agreement errors (i.e., attraction) for subject phrases in which the head and local noun mismatch in number (e.g., the apple next to the pears) when nouns are planned in parallel than when they are planned in sequence. We used a speeded picture description task that yielded sentences such as the apple next to the pears is red. The objects mentioned in the noun phrase were either semantically related or unrelated. To induce agreement errors, pictures sometimes mismatched in number. In order to manipulate the likelihood of parallel processing of the objects and to test the hypothesized relationship between parallel processing and the rate of agreement errors, the pictures were either placed close together or far apart. Analyses of the participants' eye movements and speech onset latencies indicated slower processing of the first object and stronger interference from the related (compared to the unrelated) second object in the close than in the far condition. Analyses of the agreement errors yielded an attraction effect, with more errors in mismatching than in matching conditions. However, the magnitude of the attraction effect did not differ across the close and far conditions. Thus, spatial proximity encouraged parallel processing of the pictures, which led to interference of the associated conceptual and/or lexical representation, but, contrary to the prediction, it did not lead to more attraction errors.

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“…Although this seems a cognitively costly task, it is unlikely that speakers plan word by word, as this would result in influent speech (Jaeger, Furth, & Hilliard, 2012;Smith & Wheeldon, 2004). It is also unlikely that the surface form of an entire message has been planned before articulation of a sentence, as this would result in a larger span and proportion of phonological errors than what is usually observed in healthy speakers.…”

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confidence: 99%