![]() ![]() (2004) review concludes, because this prominence correlates with predicability. On the one hand, this could mean that prominence dictates which entity takes the topical function of sentence subject in English, perhaps, as Bock et al. For example, it has been found that often more salient entities tend to be encoded as subjects of sentences ( Prat-Sala and Branigan, 2000 Gleitman et al., 2007 Myachykov and Tomlin, 2008), with flow-on consequences for the rest of the sentence (e.g., passive vs active voice, or alternative perspective descriptions). It is not hard to imagine that, in certain circumstances, the topic of the sentence may be selected before anything else is. That is, whether a speaker can, on knowing what the topic/subject of a sentence will be in an SVO language such as English, put the machinery in motion even if the rest of the utterance is still un(der)determined. This article is concerned with the initial stages of this process.Īt issue is the question of whether it is possible to start preparing a sentence for production before some structurally critical sentence constituents are, at the very least, conceptually available. Sentences are not born fully formed: they are the product of a complex process that requires first forming a conceptual representation that can be given linguistic form, then retrieving the right words related to that pre-linguistic message and putting them in the right configuration, and finally converting that bundle into a series of muscle movements that will result in the outward expression of the initial communicative intention ( Levelt, 1989). Additionally, the results hint at the possibility that other obligatory sentence constituents may also have to be available before the sentence can be processed. Among other things, this argues against strict linearity and in favor of hierarchical incrementality in sentence production. What is more, increases in the lexical frequency of the actual verbs used significantly reduced onset latencies for the subject noun as expected if the verb lemmas have to be retrieved before the sentence can be processed. The results show that sentence onset latencies varied in relation to the presentation of the verb elicitor, suggesting that sentence processing depends crucially on having access to the information pertaining to the verb. ![]() This permitted presenting them in different temporal configurations to see whether the time taken to start uttering the subject of a sentence was contingent on having access to information about the action that would determine verb selection. To investigate the role of verbs in sentence production, the experiment reported here employed a simple sentence elicitation technique based on separate elicitor images for the different sentence constituents: subject, verb, and verbal modifier. ![]() Discipline of Linguistics, University of New England, Armidale, NSW, Australia. ![]()
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