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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.

This study examines how speakers produce sentences containing tough construction ('tough' sentences), like the following: The dog is tough to please. We will examine when speakers plan the embedded verb ("please" in the example above) when producing tough sentences. In our past studies, we found that speakers plan the lemma representation of verb roots before starting to speak their underlying object arguments, but not before their underlying subject arguments. The current study test whether speakers plan the verb lemma before the articulation of the matrix subject, which under some but not other theories is an underlying object of the embedded verb.

Data and analysis scripts for "Syntactic category constrains lexical competition in speaking."

This experiment investigates the production of the sentences involving “raising to object” and “object control” sentences. For example: (1) The boy believed the dog to like the cat. (2) The boy taught the dog to like the cat. This experiment investigates the production of sentences involving “raising to object” and “object control” sentences. For example: The boy believed the dog to like the cat. The boy taught the dog to like the cat. In both sentences, “the dog” is the subject of the embedded verb “like” semantically. Also, in both cases, “the dog” is the syntactic object of the matrix verb “believed/taught,” as indicated by the fact that a pronoun would receive an accusative case. However, only in (2), “the dog” is the semantic object of the matrix verb “taught.” For this reason, those two constructions, despite surface similarity, are hypothesized to involve two different underlying structures. This experiment examines how speakers plan those sentences, and in particular, we hypothesize, according to some theories of syntax, there is a clausal boundary between “believed” and “the dog” but not between “taught” and “the dog.” Based on the an independent psycholinguistic hypothesis that two words interference more within the same clause, we predict that “the dog” and “the cat”, two words with similar meanings, interfere more in the raising to object sentences like (1) than in the object control sentences like (2).