The Effect of Thematic Roles During Grammatical Encoding in Sentence Production

Abstract

Language production is realized in three stages: conceptualization, formulation, and articulation (Levelt, 1989). Within the formulation phase, grammatical encoding has gained considerable attention as it reveals much about the underlying mechanism of sentence production. While various components have been identified as crucial factors that comprise the formulation stage, the influence of thematic roles during grammatical encoding is still controversial. This study examined the effect of thematic roles in the process of grammatical encoding. Eighteen native speakers of English participated in a sentence recall experiment with an RSVP paradigm. The experiment used hit verbs and spray-load verbs and involved three conditions, in which the order and type of syntactic structures and thematic roles varied: NPTHEME-PPLOCATION, NPLOCATION-PPTHEME and PPLOCATION-PPTHEME. The results of a conditional logistic regression model showed that in grammatical encoding, (i) thematic roles as well as syntactic structures are crucial factors, and (ii) thematic role information outweighs syntactic structure information.