Abstract
Speech planning involves different steps in order to transform a conceptual message into speech. These include establishing structural relations among constituents (i.e., relational information), and selecting the appropriate lexical items to convey the intended message (non-relational elements). However, the precise way relational and non-relational information are computed when undertaking linguistic encoding is not clear. This paper explores how the pre-linguistic message undergoes linguistic encoding, and what kind of information (relational or non-relational) is prioritized in doing so. We analyze the production planning of Relative Clauses in Spanish (a head-initial language) and Japanese (a head-final language) by monolingual speakers, by means of the eye-tracking method while participants described colored pictures. Although in both Spanish and Japanese the structure under study is the same (with the same syntactic configuration), word order is entirely opposite between both languages. In Japanese, the head noun is not uttered until the end of the clause, thus making it possible to explore sentence planning in a structure where the syntactically most dominant element (the head noun, HN) is not the first element. Variables tested were type of relative clause, with either the agent or the patient as head noun, and the animacy of the agent and the patient of the event, the latter allowing the manipulation of the conceptual saliency of the elements involved. Results showed Japanese speakers focus extensively on the HN before directing their gazes to the element they are going to utter first, suggesting a speech planning process that prioritizes relational information, that is, structural scaffolding. Spanish monolinguals, in turn, showed a pattern in which both structural and linear information appear to be more closely related from the beginning. In both languages, the animacy of isolated elements had little effect on gaze patterns. Results point to a planning process that prioritizes structural relations over access to lexical elements in order in the planning of complex structures, with room for flexibility when the grammar of the language allows so.
Highlights
In order to articulate a message, a speaker must undergo a series of stages: following the conceptual representation of the message, the speaker must choose a structural form for it, deciding on the grammatical relations among constituents and choosing the lexical elements so as to arrange them in the precise word order in which the message will be uttered, before encoding the phonological form of the words and articulating them (Bock and Levelt, 1994; Ferreira, 2010)
The following types of responses were excluded from gaze analysis: (a) responses that did not include an RC or begin with one, (b) responses that differed in meaning with respect to the verb provided or picked the wrong HN, (c) responses that failed to overtly mention the two participants involved in the event, and (d) active object RCs in which the subject preceded the verb
The same applies for experiment 2. 9Spanish allows sentences in which the subject is not overtly expressed, while the object remains in place
Summary
In order to articulate a message, a speaker must undergo a series of stages: following the conceptual representation of the message, the speaker must choose a structural form for it, deciding on the grammatical relations among constituents (structural encoding) and choosing the lexical elements (lexical encoding) so as to arrange them in the precise word order in which the message will be uttered, before encoding the phonological form of the words and articulating them (Bock and Levelt, 1994; Ferreira, 2010) These stages take place incrementally, that is, speakers do not wait until the whole process in one stage has finished in order to proceed to the stage. The relative importance of relational and nonrelational processes, and the precise moment at which each one becomes engaged in the planning process is a matter of debate, and seems to shift from one study to another
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