Language Specific and Language General Motivations of Production Choices: A Multi-Clause and Multi-Language Investigation

Abstract

Cross-linguistic studies allow for analyses that would be impossible in a single language. To better understand the factors that underlie sentence production, we investigated production choices in main and relative clause production tasks in three languages: English, Japanese and Korean. The effects of both non-linguistic attributes (such as conceptual animacy) and language specific properties (such as word order) were investigated. Japanese and Korean are structurally similar to each other but different from English, which allowed for an investigation of the production consequences of non-linguistic attributes in different typological or word order contexts (when Japanese and Korean speakers make similar production choices that are unlike those of English speakers), as well as production choices that differ despite typological similarity (when Japanese and Korean speakers make different choices). Speakers of all three languages produced more passive utterances when describing animate entities, but the overall rate of passives varied by task and language. Further, the sets of items that were most likely to elicit passives varied by language, with Japanese and Korean speakers more likely to produce passives when patients were adversely affected by the depicted event. These results suggest a number of factors that contribute to language production choices across three languages, and how general cognitive constraints on sentence production may interact with the structure of a specific language.Keywords: Sentence production; relative clauses; passives; cross-linguistic analysis; Japanese; Korean An English speaker in a coffee shop, desiring coffee, might say, "A coffee," or "I'll take coffee, a small one, please," or "May I have a small?" Even in this highly constrained context, many different utterances can convey the speaker's message. This flexibility of language production, and speakers' abilities to navigate the high number of lexical and syntactic options to converge on a single utterance form, are central features of the production process and have become important topics of research. The research presented here addresses these issues by comparing production across three different languages and two different sentence constructions. This approach provides a detailed picture of how production flexibility-the availability of alternative syntactic and lexical options to convey a message-can vary across language and message, and how these factors shape speakers' implicit choices of words and sentence structures, providing insight into how language production processes settle on an utterance plan over alternative possibilities. Multiple Forces Shaping Production ChoicesLanguage production researchers have long recognized that the properties of both words and sentence structures affect producers' implicit utterance choices. Recently, several researchers have aimed to characterize a range of these effects by contrasting two means by which speakers converge on a single string of to-be-articulated words. Sentence const...

It depends: Optionality in the production of filler-gap dependencies

“…Mandarin speakers produced more passives and omitted 9 more agents with animate relative heads as compared to inanimate ones. Finally, Montag, Matsuki, Kim and MacDonald (2017) report a replication of Gennari et al's findings from English, and a similar tendency to produce more passive relative clauses with animate relative heads as compared to inanimate ones, in Japanese and Korean, which exhibit the same constituent order as Mandarin.…”

“…In addition to further establishing the importance of similarity-based interference for grammatical encoding, this effect of relative head animacy on the formulation of head final relative clauses also demonstrates that the properties of the not-yet produced relative head can affect the formulation of the prior clause, and hence that Mandarin, Japanese and Korean speakers have planned some aspects of the relative head before producing the first words of the relative clause. This is explained as a result of a need to plan the head noun before or together with the relative clause even though the head is uttered later (Hsiao & MacDonald, 2016;Montag et al 2017). We return to head final relative clauses in the General Discussion.…”

Verbal Working Memory as Emergent from Language Comprehension and Production

“…Again, words and their orders are interdependent. Third, word orders and the presence/absence of optional words in sentences vary with semantic relationships between words, where semantic similarity between two words yields more word omissions and different word orders than in the absence of semantic similarity across words (Gennari et al, 2012;Hsiao et al, 2014;Montag et al, 2017). Thus, whereas the first two examples illustrated interactions between properties of a particular word and word order of an entire utterance, this example shows that semantic relationships between two words also affect word order.…”

A Cross-Linguistic Study of Individual Differences in Speech Planning

“…In addition to individual variability in the extent to which speakers might plan content in advance of articulation, there is evidence that planning scope can vary across languages as well (Christianson and Ferreira, 2005;Brown-Schmidt and Konopka, 2008;Myachykov et al, 2013;Norcliffe et al, 2015). Indeed, previous research has considered cross-linguistic factors that account for differences in language production [e.g., Montag et al, 2017;see Jaeger and Norcliffe (2009) for a review], but this work has not specifically addressed whether planning scope might vary by language. Brown-Schmidt and Konopka (2008) examined the different planning strategies employed by speakers of English and Spanish as they produced noun phrases with scalar modifiers.…”