The Cross‐linguistic Study of Sentence Production

Abstract

The mechanisms underlying language production are often assumed to be universal, and hence not contingent on a speaker's language. This assumption is problematic for at least two reasons. Given the typological diversity of the world's languages, only a small subset of languages has actually been studied psycholinguistically. And, in some cases, these investigations have returned results that at least superficially raise doubt about the assumption of universal production mechanisms. The goal of this paper is to illustrate the need for more psycholinguistic work on a typologically more diverse set of languages. We summarize cross-linguistic work on sentence production (specifically: grammatical encoding), focusing on examples where such work has improved our theoretical understanding beyond what studies on English alone could have achieved. But cross-linguistic research has much to offer beyond the testing of existing hypotheses: it can guide the development of theories by revealing the full extent of the human ability to produce language structures. We discuss the potential for interdisciplinary collaborations, and close with a remark on the impact of language endangerment on psycholinguistic research on understudied languages.

Predicting head-marking variability in Yucatec Maya relative clause production

“…Head-marking languages constitute one particular language type that has traditionally been beyond the purview of psycholinguistic research, and about which little is currently known from a cognitive perspective (Jaeger & Norcliff e, 2009 ). Our study represents a small step towards increasing this knowledge, and, concomitantly, extending the empirical base against which psycholinguistic theories can be evaluated.…”

“…These accounts are sometimes referred to as production ease accounts. Here we do not dispute that grammatical encoding processes can be aff ected by production ease; robust evidence for this conclusion comes from a large cross-linguistic body of research on accessibility eff ects on syntactic preferences (see Jaeger & Norcliff e, 2009 , for a review). Indeed, in 'Appendix A' we consider evidence suggesting that production ease also aff ects Yucatec relative clause production.…”

“…It is by now well established that production choices are aff ected by pressures inherent to the production system, such as the relative ease with which words and structures can be retrieved and assembled (see Jaeger and Norcliff e, 2009 , for a review). For example, speakers prefer grammatical alternatives that allow easily retrievable referents to be mentioned earlier in their utterances (Bock & Irwin, 1980 ;Bock & Warren, 1985 ;Branigan, Pickering, & Tanaka, 2008 ;Prat-Sala & Branigan, 2000 ;Tanaka, Branigan, & Pickering, 2011 ).…”

“…However, both the claim that the language production system is designed to be communicatively effi cient, and the notion that this in turn can account for typological patterns, only goes through in so far as it can be demonstrated that, across languages, speakers' on-line production choices are regulated by communicative effi ciency. As with psychological research more generally (Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan, 2010 ), research on speaker preferences in production has been undertaken on only a handful of phenomena, and a handful of languages, chief among them English (for an overview, see Jaeger & Norcliff e, 2009 ). For information-theoretic approaches to language production in particular, the empirical base is further limited, since this work tends to require larger databases on the basis of which informativity can be estimated (Bell, Brenier, Gregory, Girand, & Jurafsky, 2009 ;Piantadosi et al, 2011 ;Resnik, 1996 ).…”

Analyzing gaze allocation during language planning: a cross-linguistic study on dynamic events1

“…c r o s s -l i n g u i st i c c o n t r a st s a s a to o l i n t h e a na ly s i s o f g a z e a l l o c at i o n i n s e n t e n c e p r o d u c t i o n Cross-linguistic studies provide a particularly interesting basis for insights into patterns in attention allocation and their link to phases in language planning. Such studies show how attention patterns may vary in line with diff erent linguistic structures used by speakers of diff erent languages, and during what phases of the timecourse of the production process diff erences arise (see general overview in Brown-Schmidt & Konopka, 2008 ;Jaeger & Norcliff e, 2009 ;Papafragou, Hulbert, & Trueswell, 2008 ;Sauppe et al 2013 ;Soroli & Hickmann, 2010 ;v. Stutterheim, Andermann, Carroll, Flecken, & Schmiedtová, 2012).…”