TY - JOUR
T1 - Separating hierarchical relations and word order in language production
T2 - Is proximity concord syntactic or linear?
AU - Vigliocco, Gabriella
AU - Nicol, Janet
N1 - Funding Information:
This research was supported by the Cognitive Science Program at the University of Arizona, and in part by a National Multipurpose Research and Training Center Grant DC-01409 from the National Institute of Deafness and other Communicative Disorders to the Center for Neurogenic Communication Disorders, University of Arizona and by a NSF grant #9729118 to the first author. We wish to thank Sarah Borden, Danielle Cvitanovic, Nicole Diamond, Pam Flory, Brad Greenwell, Valerie Hooker and Susan Stait for their assistance with subject testing, transcription, and data analysis. We would like to thank Jeff Bowers, David Robertson and Jenny Saffran for their comments on the manuscript.
PY - 1998/8/1
Y1 - 1998/8/1
N2 - In this paper we address the question whether hierarchical relations and word order can be separated in sentence production. In two experiments, we assess whether subject-verb agreement errors (such as 'The time for fun and games are over') require linear proximity of a socalled 'local' noun ('games' in the example) to the verb. In the first experiment, we found a proximity effect when participants were asked to complete sentential beginnings of the kind: 'The helicopter for the flights'. In the second experiment, we asked participants to produce a question such as 'Is the helicopter for the flights safe?'. The syntactic relation between the subject noun and the local noun is the same in the two experiments, but the linear position of the local noun is different. The distribution of agreement errors was similar in the two experiments. We argue that these data provide evidence for a stage in language production in which a syntactic structure is built prior to a stage in which words are assigned to their linear position. Agreement is computed during the first stage.
AB - In this paper we address the question whether hierarchical relations and word order can be separated in sentence production. In two experiments, we assess whether subject-verb agreement errors (such as 'The time for fun and games are over') require linear proximity of a socalled 'local' noun ('games' in the example) to the verb. In the first experiment, we found a proximity effect when participants were asked to complete sentential beginnings of the kind: 'The helicopter for the flights'. In the second experiment, we asked participants to produce a question such as 'Is the helicopter for the flights safe?'. The syntactic relation between the subject noun and the local noun is the same in the two experiments, but the linear position of the local noun is different. The distribution of agreement errors was similar in the two experiments. We argue that these data provide evidence for a stage in language production in which a syntactic structure is built prior to a stage in which words are assigned to their linear position. Agreement is computed during the first stage.
KW - Agreement errors
KW - Grammatical encoding
KW - Language production
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U2 - 10.1016/S0010-0277(98)00041-9
DO - 10.1016/S0010-0277(98)00041-9
M3 - Article
C2 - 9775519
AN - SCOPUS:0032134488
SN - 0010-0277
VL - 68
SP - B13-B29
JO - Cognition
JF - Cognition
IS - 1
ER -