Prototypicality in sentence production

Abstract

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...

Order in NP conjuncts in spoken English and Japanese

“…Our results, therefore, do not allow for interpretations as to the effects of individual conceptual factors or differences between them (as discussed in e.g. Onishi et al, 2008). However, the overall pattern of results, with strong effects of the conceptual variables, gives us confidence that some conceptual properties, and thereby differences in lemma activation, do influence order in NP conjuncts.…”

“…In contrast, Kelly et al (1986) and Onishi et al (2008) report influences of the conceptual variable 'category typicality' on order in NP conjuncts. With this variable, however, it is currently unclear whether it should be regarded as an effect of conceptual or lexical accessibility (Onishi et al, 2008).…”

“…In contrast, Kelly et al (1986) and Onishi et al (2008) report influences of the conceptual variable 'category typicality' on order in NP conjuncts. With this variable, however, it is currently unclear whether it should be regarded as an effect of conceptual or lexical accessibility (Onishi et al, 2008). Interestingly, the results for the influences of lexical factors on ordering in NP conjuncts are also elusive, more specifically for the length factor, which is especially relevant in the present context: McDonald et al (1993) find no consistent effect of shorter phrases preceding longer ones and speculate that such effects may be confined to expressions that are used repeatedly, such as irreversible binomials (see above).…”

Learning to order words: A connectionist model of heavy NP shift and accessibility effects in Japanese and English

“…Although the functional/positional distinction provided a good account of how animacy or imageability influenced word order in the production of English sentences, other studies have found that message-related factors like referential availability and typicality can influence the order of elements in a conjunction (Bock & Irwin, 1980;Kelly, Bock, & Keil, 1986;Onishi et al, 2008). Furthermore, conceptual factors like animacy and referential availability can influence the order of nouns in a conjunction when it is presented in isolation both in adults and children (Byrne & Davidson, 1985;McDonald et al, 1993;Narasimhan & Dimroth, 2008).…”

“…This preference can even induce speakers to use a less frequent syntactic structure, such as the passive, to obtain early placement of accessible words (McDonald, Bock, & Kelly, 1993; e.g., ''The students were frightened by the sound" was preferred over ''The sound frightened the students"). A wide variety of conceptual and lexical factors related to the accessibility of words have been found to modulate structure selection (e.g., Bock, 1986;Bock, 1987;Bock & Irwin, 1980;Bock & Warren, 1985;Onishi, Murphy, & Bock, 2008;Prat-Sala & Branigan, 2000). However, these conceptual and lexical accessibility phenomena depend on the syntactic context that they occur in.…”