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One of the defining properties of human language is the abundance of potentially unbounded dependencies between elements in a sentence. And yet, how speakers formulate dependencies in sentence production is still poorly understood. Here we examine the timing of verb planning in sentences involving across-the-board and parasitic gap constructions. Using a new task we call the Sentence-Word Interference task, we show that speakers plan the verb of a secondary clause before sentence onset, but selectively when producing across-the-board sentences and not when producing parasitic gap sentences. Based on this timing contrast, we argue that speakers plan verbs predominantly before the production of their dependents, but only when verbs and their dependents engage in both conceptual and direct syntactic relationships. More broadly, the current study suggests that sentence planning is constrained by syntactic relationships that are not reducible to conceptual relationships or to surface word order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hundreds of languages worldwide use a sentence structure known as the "clause chain," in which 20 or more clauses can be stacked to form a sentence. The Papuan language Nungon is among a subset of clause chaining languages that require "switch-reference" suffixes on nonfinal verbs in chains. These suffixes announce whether the subject of each upcoming clause will differ from the subject of the previous clause. We examine two major issues in psycholinguistics: predictive processing in comprehension, and advance planning in production. Whereas previous work on other languages has demonstrated that sentence planning can be incremental, switch-reference marking would seem to prohibit strictly incremental planning, as it requires speakers to plan the next clause before they can finish producing the current one. This suggests an intriguing possibility: planning strategies may be fundamentally different in Nungon. We used a mobile eye-tracker and solar-powered laptops in a remote village in Papua, New Guinea, to track Nungon speakers' gaze in two experiments: comprehension and production. Curiously, during comprehension, fixation data failed to find evidence that switch-reference marking is used for predictive processing. However, during production, we found evidence for advance planning of switch-reference markers, and, by extension, the subjects they presage. We propose that this degree of advance syntactic planning pushes the boundaries of what is known about sentence planning, drawing on data from a novel morpheme type in an understudied language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Linguistic analyses suggest that there are two types of intransitive verbs: unaccusatives, whose sole argument is a patient or theme (e.g., fall), and unergatives, whose sole argument is an agent (e.g., jump). 1 Past psycholinguistic experiments suggest that this distinction affects how sentences are processed: for example, it modulates both comprehension processes ( Bever and Sanz 1997 , Friedmann et al. 2008 ) and production processes ( Kegl 1995 , Kim 2006 , M. Lee and Thompson 2004 , J. Lee and Thompson 2011 , McAllister et al. 2009 ). Given this body of evidence, it is reasonable to assume, as we do here, that this distinction is directly relevant to psycholinguistic theorizing. However, especially in production, exactly how this distinction affects processing is unknown, beyond the suggestion that unaccusatives somehow involve more complex processing than unergatives (see J. Lee and Thompson 2011 ). Here we examine how real-time planning processes in production differ for unaccusatives and unergatives. We build on previous studies on lookahead effects in sentence planning that show that verbs are planned before a deep object is uttered but not before a deep subject is uttered ( Momma, Slevc, and Phillips 2015 , 2016 ). (We use terms like deep subject in a theory-neutral fashion, with no intended commitment to a specific syntactic encoding.) This line of research sheds light on the broader issue of how the theory of argument structure relates to sentence production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]