Tough-production

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.