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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.)

The current study examines how speakers plan sentences in which two words that form hierarchical dependency relationships - arguments and verbs - appear far apart in linear distance, to investigate how linear and hierarchical aspects of sentences simultaneously shape sentence planning processes. The results of six extended picture-word interference experiments suggest that speakers retrieve sentence-final verbs before the articulation of their sentence-initial patient or theme arguments, but not agent arguments, and before retrieving sentence-medial nouns inside modifiers. These results suggest that the time-course of sentence planning reflects hierarchically-defined dependency relationships over and above linear structure., (Copyright © 2019 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Many influential models of sentence production (e.g., Bock & Levelt, 1994; Kempen & Hoenkamp, 1987; Levelt, 1989) emphasize the central role of verbs in structural encoding, and thus predict that verbs should be selected early in sentence formulation, possibly even before the phonological encoding of the first constituent (Ferreira, 2000). However, the most direct experimental test of this hypothesis (Schriefers, Teruel, & Meinshausen, 1998) found no evidence for advance verb selection in verb-final (subject-verb and subject-object-verb) utterances in German. The current study, based on a multiword picture-word interference task (Meyer, 1996; Schriefers et al., 1998), demonstrates that in Japanese, a strongly verb-final language, verbs are indeed planned in advance, but selectively before object noun articulation and not before subject noun articulation. This contrasting pattern of advance verb selection may reconcile the motivation for advance verb selection in structural encoding while explaining the previous failures to demonstrate it. Potential mechanisms that might underlie this contrasting pattern of advance verb selection are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record, ((c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved).)

Semanticists have debated the extent to which modality and causation are related in natural language. This paper aims to promote a theory in which overt causatives share core components of meaning with deontic modals. We report a sentence recall experiment that suggests that priming can be used to target the high-level semantic representations shared between two syntactically distinct linguistic expressions. Our results show that it's possible to prime the production of the deontic modal 'had to' (e.g., ``George 'had to' go to the store"), with causative 'made' (e.g., ``Jane 'made' George go to the store''), suggesting that the two expressions share a component of their meaning. Our results contribute to the methodological development in experimental semantics by establishing the utility of the priming effect to target meaning.

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]