Word Order and Voice Influence the Timing of Verb Planning in German Sentence Production

Abstract

Theories of incremental sentence production make different assumptions about when speakers encode information about described events and when verbs are selected, accordingly. An eye tracking experiment on German testing the predictions from linear and hierarchical incrementality about the timing of event encoding and verb planning is reported. In the experiment, participants described depictions of two-participant events with sentences that differed in voice and word order. Verb-medial active sentences and actives and passives with sentence-final verbs were compared. Linear incrementality predicts that sentences with verbs placed early differ from verb-final sentences because verbs are assumed to only be planned shortly before they are articulated. By contrast, hierarchical incrementality assumes that speakers start planning with relational encoding of the event. A weak version of hierarchical incrementality assumes that only the action is encoded at the outset of formulation and selection of lexical verbs only occurs shortly before they are articulated, leading to the prediction of different fixation patterns for verb-medial and verb-final sentences. A strong version of hierarchical incrementality predicts no differences between verb-medial and verb-final sentences because it assumes that verbs are always lexically selected early in the formulation process. Based on growth curve analyses of fixations to agent and patient characters in the described pictures, and the influence of character humanness and the lack of an influence of the visual salience of characters on speakers' choice of active or passive voice, the current results suggest that while verb planning does not necessarily occur early during formulation, speakers of German always create an event representation early.

Mutual attraction between high-frequency verbs and clause types with finite verbs in early positions: corpus evidence from spoken English, Dutch, and German

“…This course of events implies that anterior clause positions exert more time pressure on the lexical selection of suitable fillers than posterior positions (see Sauppe, 2017 for experimental evidence from German). With respect to finite verbs, this means that easy and fast accessibility is in greater demand in main clauses than in subordinate clauses, given that the large majority of finite subordinate clauses is attached to the next higher (often main) clause as the latter's most posterior constituent (tail recursion, creating the impression that finite clauses are like beads on a string).…”

“…(Recently, Berg, 2018 wrote a detailed overview of frequency effects in a variety of syntactic constructions.) Lexical accessibility is prone to online fluctuations under the influence of priming and visual cueingconditions leading to pre-activation of lexical items and to the construction of sentences that afford early placement of pre-activated items (Hwang &Kaiser, 2015 andSauppe, 2017 review the literature and report new data).…”

The Role of Verbs in Sentence Production

“…That is, it should not be possible to start preparing a sentence before the action is known since it is what ties the different participants in an event together and what will ultimately, in the form of a verb, underpin the relationships between the different sentence constituents. In fact, early psycholinguistic accounts of sentence production assumed verbs played a critical role in the generation of a sentence by being responsible for its basic structural shape (Levelt, 1989;Bock and Levelt, 1994;Ferreira, 2000)-an assumption that has found some empirical support from, among others, eye tracking and priming experiments (Pickering and Branigan, 1998;Melinger and Dobel, 2005;Hwang and Kaiser, 2014;Antón-Méndez, 2017;Sauppe, 2017). For example, Antón-Méndez (2017, Figure 3) found facilitation during picture description when the action in the sentence to be produced had been linguistically primed, but not when the subject had been visually primed, suggesting the verb plays a major role in sentence planning.…”

“…Efforts to test the relevance of verbs in sentence production have relied on indirect evidence: priming (e.g., Antón-Méndez, 2017), semantic interference (e.g., Momma et al, 2016), distributed looks to event participants (e.g., Sauppe, 2017;Konopka, 2019), etc. The reason is that the sorts of sentence elicitation techniques used in the past, based on descriptions of pictured events, conflate the actions with the actors making it difficult to manipulate them independently-that is, in the eliciting pictures, the information that would ultimately be conveyed in the form of a verb is not isolatable from the depiction of the actors in the event.…”

Encoding actions and verbs: Tracking the time-course of relational encoding during message and sentence formulation.

“…Another approach to tracking the processing of relational information is to compare formulation of verb-initial, verb-medial and verb-final sentences across languages (e.g., Hwang & Kaiser, 2014;Konopka & Kuchinsky, 2015;Momma, Slevc, & Phillips, 2016Norcliffe et al, 2015;Santesteban, Pickering, Laka, & Branigan, 2015;Sauppe, Norcliffe, Konopka, Brown, van Valin, & Levinson, 2013;Sauppe, 2017;Schriefers, Teruel, & Meinshausen, 1998).…”