Sentence Production

Week 2: Fall 2023

“Speak only if it improves upon the silence.”

– Mahatma Gandhi
Introduction
Key questions

• How much planning happens prior to speaking?

• What are the units of planning?

• What are the important stages of utterance/sentence

production?

• What in uences the way an utterance is formulated

grammatically, or linearly ordered?

• How does production re ect syntactic structure?

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Key methods

• Visual-world eye tracking (see extra handout and links

on Canvas).

• Structural priming

• Sentence recall task

Starting with a message

• Pre-verbal

• Part of a mental model

• Propositional

• Includes potential thematic roles

• Could be formulated in many ways

Thematic roles

• Thematic roles: associate the entities in a message with

the roles they play in the ‘action.’

• Agent of the action

• Theme (patient) of the action

• Recipient, experiencer, etc.

• Even a message with all of the same thematic roles can

be expressed in different ways!
Sentence Production

Conceptualization • Production starts with a

non-verbal message.

• This message includes

Formulation information about
The mental lexicon thematic roles,
Grammatical
Lemmas information structure.
encoding
Functional processing
Lexemes
Positional processing • Pauses and dis uencies
can give us information
about planning processes.
Phonological
encoding
• Listeners use information
from dis uencies in
interpreting spoken
language.

Articulation
see Levelt, 1989, Speaking
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Sentence Production

Conceptualization • Production starts with a

non-verbal message.

• This message includes

Formulation information about
The mental lexicon thematic roles,
Grammatical
Lemmas information structure.
encoding
Functional processing
Lexemes
Positional processing • Pauses and dis uencies
can give us information
about planning processes.
Phonological
encoding
• Listeners use information
from dis uencies in
interpreting spoken
language.

Articulation
see Levelt, 1989, Speaking
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Eye gaze, conceptualization and planning
What constrains the content of an utterance?

• The language being spoken

• The discourse context

• The visual context

• The linguistic context

• The intended addressee

See Konopka & Brown-Schmidt, 2008

 Visual events and planning: The eye-mind
792 DeANGELUS AND PELZ
hypothesis
792 DeANGELUS AND PELZ

• Yarbus (1967) – Task demands in uence eye movement

792 patterns.
DeANGELUS AND PELZ

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 Visual events and planning: The eye-mind
792 DeANGELUS AND PELZ
hypothesis
792 DeANGELUS AND PELZ

• Yarbus (1967) – Task demands in uence eye movement

792 patterns.
DeANGELUS AND PELZ

Free examination

Give the ages of the people

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Visual events and planning

• Visual events can in uence

the order of mention.
50%
• Gleitman et al. (2007, JML):
scene description task with
an attention-capture
manipulation.

“The Samoan boxer lost the ght”

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Visual events and planning

• But, it’s not the case

that formulation is
entirely driven by visual
information.

• Bock & Grif n (2000,

Psychological Science)

• Results suggest a
short period of event
apprehension prior to
formulation.
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Visual context
• Some contexts require a modi er for a
referent to be uniquely identi ed.

• Brown-Schmidt & Tanenhaus (2006)

measured eye movements while a
participant told a listener where to
click.

• The presence of a modi er was

connected to eye gaze on the
contrasting object.

• Early looks to the contrast object -

prenominal modi er (the small
horse).

• Late looks - repair (the horse… uh Small horse Big horse

the small one).
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Planning units
• Do we plan an entire utterance before we say it?

• Early accounts on both sides:

• Wundt 1900: Wholistic conceptualization of the event occurs before

speaking.

• Paul 1880: Messages planned incrementally.

• Some evidence for planning at the phrase level.

• When planning begins with a message, the entire event structure of an

utterance may be somewhat planned in advance.

• More recent evidence suggests that planning can proceed in smaller units.
Planning NPs
• Konopka & Brown-
Schmidt (2008, Cognition)

• The small butter y; la

mariposa pequeña

• Spanish-English bilinguals
looked at the contrast item
overall later when
producing Spanish NPs
than English NPs.
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 Section summary

• There is a link between visual attention and language

processing.

• In production, we look at what is going to be mentioned, either

• Because our attention has been attracted to an object, and

therefore it will be mentioned, or

• Because our conceptualization of the overall event

in uences which participant will be mentioned.

• While some planning takes place at higher levels, planning can

also take place over units smaller than a phrase.
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Information structure and dis uencies

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Information structure

• Discourse-new:

• Guess what? I ran into Bob yesterday.

• Discourse-given:

• A: Bob can be such a dummy.

• B: I ran into Bob yesterday.

Information structure

• Focus and Topic

Who ate the beans? JOHN ate the beans.

It’s John that ate the beans.

What did John eat? John ate the BEANS.

It’s the beans that John ate.

 • The message that a speaker is planning can include
what information is highlighted/topicalized.

• Discourse status may also affect planning.

• How are information structure and dis uencies

related?

• Dis uencies are more likely before new

information than given information (Arnold et
al., 2000, Language).
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 Are listeners sensitive to this information?
New Information 29

• Arnold et al., 2003,

Journal of Psycholinguistic
Research

• Monitored eye movements

during the ambiguous part
of a word (CANdy/dle).

• More looks to the new

1. Put
visual thecontaining
display grapes four
below the (candle,
objects camel, grapes,(non-given)
camel/candle salt shaker). object with a
2. Now put the candle below the salt dis uency.
shaker.
3. Now put theee, uh, candle below the
salt shaker.
ial the scene contained two cohort competitor objects (e.g.,
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Section wrap up

• Pauses and dis uencies can give us information about

planning processes.

• Listeners use information from dis uencies in interpreting

spoken language.
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Formulation
Sentence Production

Conceptualization • Production starts with a

non-verbal message.

• This message includes

Formulation information about
The mental lexicon thematic roles,
Grammatical
Lemmas information structure.
encoding
Functional processing
Lexemes
Positional processing • Pauses and dis uencies
can give us information
about planning processes.
Phonological
encoding
• Listeners use information
from dis uencies in
interpreting spoken
language.

Articulation
see Levelt, 1989, Speaking
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Conceptualization

Pre-verbal message

Formulation

Phonetic plan (internal speech)

Articulation

External speech
 Formulation The mental lexicon
Lemmas
Grammatical encoding

Lexemes

Phonological encoding
 Formulation The mental lexicon
Lemmas
Grammatical encoding

Lexemes

Phonological encoding
 Grammatical encoding

Functional processing
Assigns a lemma to a grammatical
function.

Positional processing
Lemmas are arranged into a linear
order
• Functional representation:

Verb = {Hunt}, Subject = {Roger}, Object = {straw}: sg., indef.,

Time = past

• Positional representation:

N1 V[past] Det. N2

• What would this look like if a passive was going to be

produced instead?
Evidence from speech errors

• Same-category exchanges -> error in function

assignment.

Seymour sliced the knife with a saLAmi.

a hole full of oors (compare: holes full of a oor)

• Compare to sound exchanges -> error in ordering of sounds.

So while you do the cooking, Bill snovels show, does he?

Examples: Fromkin, 1973

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Evidence from experiments

• Collecting speech errors from natural production can tell

us a great deal about planning.

• BUT - we can’t be sure to have enough data/the right

data to test every hypothesis.

• To test speci c hypotheses, linguists have come up with

experimental paradigms to study production in a more
controlled manner.
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Demonstration

• Read the following sentences to yourself (or out loud

quietly).

• When you see a picture, use a sentence to describe it.

Based on Bock, 1986, in Cognitive Psychology.

A struggling student was tutored by a math expert.
The referee was punched by one of the fans.
What did you say to describe the picture?
What did you say to describe the picture?

The tree was struck by lightning.

Lightning struck the tree.

Image by Jonny Lindner from Pixabay

Would you have used a different sentence if you had
previously read:

A math expert tutored a young student.

One of the fans punched the referee.

?

Image by Jonny Lindner from Pixabay

 Structural priming

SYNTAX IN LANGUAGE PRODUCTION 361

TRANSITIVE DATIVE

PRIMING SENTENCES

ACTIVE: PREPOSITIONAL:
Structural priming: “A tendency to repeat
ONE OF THE FANS
PUNCHED THE
A ROCK STAR SOLD
SOME COCAINE TO AN or better process a current sentence because of
its structural similarity to a previously
REFEREE. UNDERCOVER AGENT.

PASSIVE:
THE REFEREE WAS
DOUBLE OBJECT:
A ROCK STAR SOLD
experienced (“prime”) sentence.”
PUNCHED BY ONE AN UNDERCOVER AGENT
OF THE FANS. SOME COCAINE.

TARGET PICTURES

Pickering and Ferreira, Psychological Bulletin, 2008.

Examples of transitive and dative priming sentences and target pictures used in
nt 1. Only one of the two alternative priming sentence forms was presented on
 Structural priming

SYNTAX IN LANGUAGE PRODUCTION 361

TRANSITIVE DATIVE

PRIMING SENTENCES

ACTIVE:
ONE OF THE FANS
PREPOSITIONAL:
A ROCK STAR SOLD
Key structural alternations:
PUNCHED THE SOME COCAINE TO AN
REFEREE. UNDERCOVER AGENT.

PASSIVE: DOUBLE OBJECT: Transitive sentences:

THE REFEREE
PUNCHED
WAS
BY ONE
OF THE FANS.
A ROCK STAR SOLD
AN UNDERCOVER
SOME COCAINE.
AGENT Active vs. Passive
TARGET PICTURES
Dative alternation:
Double object vs. Prepositional dative.

Examples of transitive and dative priming sentences and target pictures used in
nt 1. Only one of the two alternative priming sentence forms was presented on
 Structural priming

SYNTAX IN LANGUAGE PRODUCTION

• Robust
361
across tasks:
DATIVE
TRANSITIVE
• Repetition and picture description (Bock
PRIMING SENTENCES
& Grif n, 2000).
ACTIVE: PREPOSITIONAL:

Listening and picture description (Bock,

ONE OF THE FANS A ROCK STAR SOLD
PUNCHED
REFEREE.
THE SOME COCAINE
UNDERCOVER
TO AN
AGENT.
•

PASSIVE: DOUBLE OBJECT:

Dell, Chang & Onishi, 2007).
THE REFEREE WAS A ROCK STAR SOLD
PUNCHED BY ONE AN UNDERCOVER AGENT
OF THE FANS. SOME COCAINE.
• Dialogue tasks (Branigan et al., 2000).
TARGET PICTURES

• Written sentence completion (Pickering &

Branigan, 1998).

Examples of transitive and dative priming sentences and target pictures used in
nt 1. Only one of the two alternative priming sentence forms was presented on
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The lexical boost

• Structural priming is not dependent on having

overlapping lexical items (e.g., verbs).

• BUT - having overlapping lexical items tends to increase

the priming effect (the lexical boost).

Pickering & Branigan, 1998, JML.

Priming as learning
• Is structural priming the result of a brie y activated memory
representation, or longer-term learning?

• Explicit memory for sentences fades very quickly.

• Bock and Grif n (2000) investigated structural processing across

lags.

• Participants read prime sentences with different numbers of

intervening distractor items before the critical picture.

• Short lags: 0, 1, 2 sentences

• Long lags: Up to 10 sentences

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Persistence of priming

Priming up to Priming at
2 sentences later 10 sentences later

Short lags Long lags

Bock & Grif n, 2000: JEP General

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Think about…

• What does the existence of structural priming tell us

about grammatical encoding?
Section wrap-up
• Grammatical encoding involves lemmas.

• Two stages of grammatical encoding:

• Functional processing

• Positional processing

• Evidence:

• Speech errors in grammatical assignment

• Priming of syntactic structures

• Psycholinguistic method: Structural priming task

Conceptual accessibility

• Are some concepts more “thinkable” than others?

• More accessible from our store of conceptual information

in memory?

• What factors might play a role?

 Conceptual accessibility
• Entities are more accessible if they are:

• salient

• given

• animate

• de nite

• concrete

• the object of the speaker’s interest/empathy

• Hypothesis: If an entity is more accessible, it could be associated with a

prominent (subject) function or an earlier position in the sentence.
Bock and Warren, 1985, Cognition
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 Sixteen pairs of sentences were constructed of each of three syntactic types.
The three types were simple declaratives, datives, and phrasal conjuncts. The
members of the declarative and dative pairs were alternative structural reali-
zations for sentences of the type represented by the pair. These were active

Sentence recall task

and passive declaratives, and prepositional and double-object datives. The
members of the phrasal conjunct pairs differed only in the order of the nouns
within the conjunct. Since one of these orders for each pair was intuitively
• Procedure:
more natural than the other, the members of these pairs were designated the
natural-order and unnatural-order conjuncts. Both of the sentences in each
• pair had the same basic meaning and contained the same two target nouns.
Sentences played for the subject (B&W: 12).
In the active and passive sentences making up the simple declarative pairs,
the target nouns were the heads of the surface subject and object noun
• Short digit task (why?)
phrases. In prepositional and double-object datives, the targets were the
heads of the direct and indirect object noun phrases. In phrasal conjuncts,
Participants
• the targets wererecall
the the
twosentences
nouns in abased on a prompt
conjunctive (B&W: Examples
noun phrase. verb). of
pairs of each type are given in Table 2.
• Independent variables:
The 96 target Accessibility
nouns were (imageability),
selected from the Paivio et Sentence
al (1968) form
imageability
norms. Half of the targets were high in imageability, with a mean imageability
rating of 6.58 and a range from 6.30 to 6.87, and half were low in imageability,
• Dependent variable: Number of “errors” in each condition.

Table 2. Examples of three types of sentence pairs

Sentence type Form Example

Simple declarative Active The doctor administered the shock.

Passive The shock was administered by the doctor.
Dative Prepositional The old hermit left the property to the university.
Double object The old hermit left the university the property.
Phrasal conjunct Natural order The lost hiker fought time and winter.
Unnatural order The lost hiker fought winter and time.
Results & Discussion

• More order errors when making an error brought the

imageable entity into the earlier position.

The shock was administered by the doctor ->

The doctor administered the shock

• BUT - no effect with coordinations.

• Does accessibility only affect functional encoding?

 and
assignment of the subject function vs. other functions, we choic
will refer to both direct objects and oblique objects using sente
the umbrella term object.) As in English, Japanese noun the i
phrase conjunctions also allow alternative orders, such that assig

Recall task, Japanese

two conjuncts (bearing the same grammatical function) can whic
appear in either order (3a and b). Note that -NOM denotes tity,
nominative case; -ACC denotes accusative case; -ACT denotes that
active voice; -PAS denotes passive voice. imat
ried
• In Japanese, direct objects (1a) ボートが漁師を運んだ。(Active SOV sentence)
booto-ga ryoshi-o hakonda.
affec
conju
can appear before subjects boat-NOM fisherman-ACC carried-ACT
‘The boat carried the fisherman.’
claus
place
in actives sentences. Ex
varia
mati
(1b) 漁師をボートが運んだ。(Active OSV sentence)
• Tanaka et al. (2012) used ryoshi-o booto-ga hakonda.
fisherman-ACC boat-NOM carried-ACT
funct
sente

Japanese to test whether ‘The fisherman, the boat carried.’

ject,
tive

accessibility affects objec

the a

functional and/or positional (2a) 漁師がボートによって運ばれた。(Passive SOV

sentence)
sente
as Th

encoding. ryoshi-ga booto-niyotte hakobareta.

fisherman-NOM boat-OBL carried-PAS
when
tity a
‘The fisherman was carried by the boat.’ the a
sente
• Operational de nition of carri

accessibility: animacy (2b) ボートによって漁師が運ばれた。(Passive OSV

sentence)
Expe

booto-niyotte ryoshi-ga hakobareta.

Meth
boat-OBL fisherman-NOM carried-PAS
‘By the boat, the fisherman was carried.’
Parti
Fo
paym
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Predictions

• If accessibility only affects functional encoding:

• If accessibility (also) affects positional encoding:

 Results & Discussion
ory and Language 65 (2011) 318–330 323 • More OSV sentences recalled as SOV overall.
60

• More inversions OSV -> SOV when the S was

% word-order inversions

50

40 animate.
30

20
• Therefore, animacy does not affect solely
10 grammatical function assignment.
0
SOV OSV Conj
Structure • A second experiment showed that animacy
animate-first inanimate-first
also affects grammatical function assignment!
Fig. 1. Experiment 1: Percentage of word order inversions on recall by
condition.

• No effect with coordinations (like Bock &

models allow the simultaneous inclusion of by-participant
and by-item variation and thus remove the need for sepa-
Warren) -> maybe coordinations are planned
rate F1 and F2 analyses. These models can be thought of as units?
as predicting the probability of a specific response (a word
order inversion response) in the different conditions (see
Agresti, 2002; Jaeger, 2008).
Factor labels were transformed into numerical values,
and centered prior to analysis, so as to have a mean of 0
and a range of 1. This procedure minimizes collinearity be-
tween variables (Baayen, 2008), and, in combination with
Section wrap-up

• Some concepts are easier to access than others

(conceptual accessibility).

• Accessibility has an effect on sentence production.

• Both functional processing and positional

processing levels.

• Psycholinguistic method: Sentence recall task

Sentence production and syntactic theory
Production and syntax

• The way sentences are produced can tell you about their
underlying structure.

Who does Max want to ask?

Who does Max want to leave?

Production and syntax

• The way sentences are produced can tell you about their
underlying structure.

Who does Max wanna ask ____?

Who does Max wanna leave ____?

Production and syntax

• The way sentences are produced can tell you about their
underlying structure.

Who does Max want ___ to ask?

Who does Max want ___ to leave?

Prosody and ambiguity

• When Beyoncé sings the song is a hit.

• When Beyoncé sings the song it’s a hit.

• Note: Punctuation in writing can often help to avoid this

kind of ambiguity!
Wrap up

• Today’s class: Conceptualization, planning and

formulation.

• Next time: Retrieving words

Self-check questions
Quiz #1

• Which of the following statements is FALSE:

1. Visual attention is in uenced by an individual’s goals.

2. Visual attention is in uenced by language processing.

3. Language production is only in uenced by visual

salience.

4. Language production is linked to gaze patterns in a

visual context.
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Quiz #2

• Which of the following statements is TRUE:

• Structural priming re ects only explicit memory of a

sentence that has been heard, read or produced.

• Reading or producing a prepositional dative increases the

likelihood of producing a prepositional dative in a picture
description.

• Reading or producing a passive sentence decreases the

likelihood of producing a passive in a picture description.

• Structural priming is limited to reading studies.

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Quiz #3

• Which of the following are assumptions we make

(motivated by previous studies) about the sentence recall
task?

1. If we design the task right, we are not testing explicit

memory of the sentences.

2. People tend to misremember sentences in a way

that makes them more natural.

3. People can remember up to 12 sentences at a time.

For next week

• Grif n & Ferreira reading

• Assignment 1 will be posted by Friday and due one week

later (content mainly Week 2).
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