Two experiments investigated sentence production processes underlying the tendency for given information to precede new information in a sentence. The factors hypothesized to contribute to this effect were referential availability and lexical availability. Experiment 1 found that information coreferential with an antecedent referring expression tended to occur earlier in produced sentences than new information. This effect was more pronounced when the information was lexically identical to its antecedent. Experiment 2 found lexical availability effects when referential functions were minimized. These results may be accounted for by assuming that both referential availability and lexical availability contribute to the speed of lexicalization processes in sentence production, and that the order in which constituents become available after lexicalization influences surface syntactic organization processes.