The Production of Head-Initial and Head-Final Languages

Abstract

While there have been many investigations of the comprehension of head-final languages, there have been fewer studies of how they are produced. In this chapter, we discuss the mechanisms of syntactic processing in the production of head-initial and head-final languages. In particular, we consider three factors that have been hypothesized to influence syntactic choice in language production – the conceptual accessibility of nouns, structural priming and the length of noun phrases and examine how these phenomena influence syntactic processing in head-initial and head-final languages. We then discuss the extent to which syntactic processing might involve the same mechanisms in head-initial and head-final language production.