Describing simple events: The dynamics of incremental grammatical encoding

Abstract

Past research on grammatical encoding in speech production mostly involved either determining the proportions of choices between alternative syntactic structures as a function of the conceptual availability of referents, or comparisons of utterance onset latencies for given syntactic structures. We will argue that this approach does not do full justice to the dynamics of the incrementality of production. In five experiments we asked participants to describe animations involving two moving objects. We manipulated the temporal availability of pieces of the conceptual input by withholding for short periods of time either (1) the information about the movement direction of one of the objects, (2) its identity, or (3) both types of information. The results show that both the temporal availability of different types of conceptual information and the latency of utterance onset affect the syntactic structure of descriptions. The results are discussed in the context of theories of incremental syntactic encoding in language production.