Meaning, sound, and syntax: Lexical priming in sentence production.

Bock, J. Kathryn

doi:10.1037/0278-7393.12.4.575

Cited by 197 publications

(201 citation statements)

References 56 publications

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“…Ad hoc categories, lacking that lexical link, therefore do not show Kelly et al (1986), that typicality did not influence choice of a constituent as subject or object? Given that syntactic, sentence-level ordering seems not to be strongly influenced by lexical form (Bock, 1986), the lexical account is consistent with their null result. However, null results may always be due to a failure to find the correct experimental conditions to reveal the effect.…”

supporting

confidence: 73%

Prototypicality in sentence production

Onishi

Murphy

Bock

2008

Cognitive Psychology

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Three cued-recall experiments examined the effect of category typicality on the ordering of words in sentence production. Past research has found that typical items tend to be mentioned before atypical items in a phrase-a pattern usually associated with lexical variables (like word frequency), and yet typicality is a conceptual variable. Experiment 1 revealed that an appropriate conceptual framework was necessary to yield the typicality effect. Experiment 2 tested ad-hoc categories that do not have prior representations in long-term memory and yielded no typicality effect. Experiment 3 used carefully matched sentences in which two category members appeared in the same or in different phrases. Typicality affected word order only when the two words appeared in the same phrase. These results are consistent with an account in which typicality has its origin in conceptual structure, which leads to differences in lexical accessibility in appropriate contexts.When people talk, the order of their words matters: Lee inspired Pat does not mean the same thing as Pat inspired Lee. How do people decide which words to say first? The syntax of English provides one constraint, as some words need to be the subject or object, given the meaning to be communicated. But English sometimes provides alternative ways to convey approximately the same meaning. For example, English allows us to say Lee inspired Pat and Pat was inspired by Lee. Passive sentences differ in structure and word order, but they provide the same basic information as the corresponding actives. Options may also differ in word order alone. Saying either Please bring some apples and kiwis to the party or Please bring some kiwis and apples to the party would probably lead to the same outcome (two sorts of fruit at the event), even though the order of words is different. In this article, we examine the factors that affect word order when order matters to sentence structure and whether those factors are the same when order does not greatly affect structure.One principle determining word order is that things that are easier to say tend to get said earlier (Bock, 1982). There are at least two ways in which things can be easier to say: It can be easier to access the concept, or it can be easier to access the word that refers to the concept (Bock, 1987a;Clark & Clark, 1977). Both of these factors, called respectively conceptual and lexical accessibility, have been shown to affect the ordering of words in sentences (Bock, 1977; 1987a,b;Bock & Irwin, 1980;Bock & Warren, 1985;Kelly, Bock, & Keil, 1986; Please address all correspondence to: Gregory L. Murphy, Department of Psychology, New York University, 6 Washington Place, 8th floor, New York, NY 10003, gregory.murphy@nyu.edu. Publisher's Disclaimer: This is a PDF file of an unedited manuscript that has been accepted for publication. As a service to our customers we are providing this early version of the manuscript. The manuscript will undergo copyediting, typesetting, and review of the resulting proof before it i...

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supporting

confidence: 73%

Prototypicality in sentence production

Onishi

Murphy

Bock

2008

Cognitive Psychology

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“…The latter strategy has the advantage that it reduces the latency to begin the housekeeping chores, and it allows planning and execution to take place in parallel. Similarly, as Bock has argued (Bock, 1986(Bock, , 1987a(Bock, , 1987bBock, Loebell, & Morey, 1992), if the sentence production system places the most available concept into an early sentence position, speaking can begin while the rest of the sentence is being planned. If the discourse production system begins descriptions with easier material, the work of planning the more difficult material can be carried out in parallel with articulation.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 95%

“…Recent work in language production has uncovered some ofthe processes underlying decisions about word order in sentences. For example, Bock and colleagues (Bock, 1986(Bock, , 1987a(Bock, , 1987bBock & Warren, 1985;Kelly, Bock, & Keil, 1986) have shown that words that are frequent, prototypical, concrete, or semantically primed tend to take earlier positions in a sentence. Ferreira (1994) has demonstrated that thematic roles such as agent and experiencer tend to be subjects and that roles such as theme and patient tend to be objects.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Linearization strategies during language production

Ferreira

Henderson

1998

Memory & Cognition

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“…In accord with this, context can affect sentence formulation in monologue, so that a focused phrase is produced first (Bock 1986a;Prat-Sala & Branigan 2000). Prat-Sala and Branigan, in particular, found effects of focus on word order that were not due to differences in grammatical role.…”

Section: Producing Words and Sentencesmentioning

confidence: 92%

Some notes on priming, alignment, and self-monitoring

Schiller

Ruiter

2004

Behav. Brain Sci.

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Traditional mechanistic accounts of language processing derive almost entirely from the study of monologue. Yet, the most natural and basic form of language use is dialogue. As a result, these accounts may only offer limited theories of the mechanisms that underlie language processing in general. We propose a mechanistic account of dialogue, the interactive alignment account, and use it to derive a number of predictions about basic language processes. The account assumes that, in dialogue, the linguistic representations employed by the interlocutors become aligned at many levels, as a result of a largely automatic process. This process greatly simplifies production and comprehension in dialogue. After considering the evidence for the interactive alignment model, we concentrate on three aspects of processing that follow from it. It makes use of a simple interactive inference mechanism, enables the development of local dialogue routines that greatly simplify language processing, and explains the origins of self-monitoring in production. We consider the need for a grammatical framework that is designed to deal with language in dialogue rather than monologue, and discuss a range of implications of the account.Keywords: common ground; dialogue; dialogue routines; language comprehension; language production; monitoring; perception-behavior link leagues (e.g., Brennan & Clark 1996;Wilkes-Gibbs & Clark 1992; also Brennan & Schober 2001;Horton & Keysar 1996). Well-controlled studies of language production in dialogue may require some ingenuity, but such experimental ingenuity has always been a strength of psychology.The theoretical reason why psycholinguistics has ignored dialogue is that psycholinguistics has derived most of its predictions from generative linguistics, and generative linguistics has developed theories of isolated, decontextualized sentences that are used in texts or speeches, that is, in monologue. In contrast, dialogue is inherently interactive and contextualized: Each interlocutor both speaks and comprehends during the course of the interaction; each interrupts both others and himself; on occasion two or more speakers collaborate in producing the same sentence (Coates 1990). So it is not surprising that generative linguists commonly view dialogue as being of marginal grammaticality, contaminated by theoretically uninteresting complexities. Dialogue sits ill with the competence/performance distinction assumed by most generative linguistics (Chomsky 1965), because it is hard to determine whether a particular utterance is "well-formed" or not (or even whether that notion is relevant to dialogue). Thus, linguistics has tended to concentrate on developing generative grammars and related theories for isolated sentences; and psycholinguistics has tended to develop processing theories that draw upon the rules and representations assumed by generative linguistics. So far as most psycholinguists have thought about dialogue, they have tended to assume that the results of experiments on monologue can be...

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Meaning, sound, and syntax: Lexical priming in sentence production.

Cited by 197 publications

References 56 publications

Prototypicality in sentence production

Prototypicality in sentence production

Linearization strategies during language production

Some notes on priming, alignment, and self-monitoring

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