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Five recall-based structural priming experiments tested the predictions about dative structural priming derived from a new theory of structure building in sentence production. When both prime and target sentences contained direct object filler-gap dependencies, repeating a dative verb enhanced dative priming (the lexical boost). In contrast, the lexical boost was not observed when only target sentences contained object filler-gap dependencies. Additionally, the lexical boost was not observed when prime and target sentences contained object filler-gap dependencies but had mismatching tenses/aspects. In contrast, when neither prime nor target sentences contained object filler-gap dependencies, the lexical boost was observed despite prime and target sentences having different tenses/aspects. These findings confirm the unique set of predictions of the proposed theory, which posits that the size of compositional units is affected by the dependency structures of sentences., (Copyright © 2023 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

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., (© 2022. The Psychonomic Society, Inc.)

In a sentence like Who does the artist think chased the chef?, the who at the beginning depends on the last bit of the sentence, chased the chef. This is an instance of a long-distance dependency. What is the nature of the cognitive process that allows speakers to produce sentences that include distant elements that form dependencies? In four experiments, speakers described drawings that elicited long-distance dependencies. Critically, speakers were sometimes primed to produce a that in sentences where that was ungrammatical due to a grammatical constraint known as the that-trace constraint (e.g.,*Who does the artist think that chased the chef). Results showed that, when primed to say an ungrammatical that, speakers were slower to start to speak. Because the that-trace constraint applies selectively to certain configurations of long-distance dependencies, this suggests that the grammatical details of the long-distance dependency are already planned before speakers start to speak the sentences involving long-distance dependencies. I propose a formal model that explains how speakers plan long-distance dependencies in advance of speaking them while also managing the cognitive pressure to speak sentences incrementally., (Copyright © 2021 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

We report two experiments that suggest that syntactic category plays a key role in limiting competition in lexical access in speaking. We introduce a novel sentence-picture interference (SPI) paradigm, and we show that nouns (e.g., running as a noun) do not compete with verbs (e.g., walking as a verb) and verbs do not compete with nouns in sentence production, regardless of their conceptual similarity. Based on this finding, we argue that lexical competition in production is limited by syntactic category. We also suggest that even complex words containing category-changing derivational morphology can be stored and accessed together with their final syntactic category information. We discuss the potential underlying mechanism and how it may enable us to speak relatively fluently., (Copyright © 2020 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Attempts to explain linguistic phenomena as consequences of memory constraints require detailed specification of linguistic representations and memory architectures alike. We discuss examples of supposed locality biases in language comprehension and production, and their link to memory constraints. Findings do not generally favor Christiansen & Chater's (C&C's) approach. We discuss connections to debates that stretch back to the nineteenth century.

Syntactic structures can convey certain (subtle) emergent properties of events. For example, the double-object dative ("the doctor is giving a patient pills") can convey the successful transfer of possession, whereas its syntactic alternative, the prepositional dative ("the doctor is giving pills to a patient"), conveys just a transfer to a location. Four experiments explore how syntactic structures may become associated with particular semantic content - such as these emergent properties of events. Experiment 1 provides evidence that speakers form associations between syntactic structures and particular event depictions. Experiment 2 shows that these associations also hold for different depictions of the same events. Experiments 3 and 4 implicate representations of the semantic features of events in these associations. Taken together, these results reveal an effect we term syntactic entrainment that is well positioned to reflect the recalibration of the strength of the mappings or associations that allow syntactic structures to convey emergent properties of events.