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      Syntactic complexity effects in sentence production.

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          Abstract

          Syntactic complexity effects have been investigated extensively with respect to comprehension (e.g., Demberg & Keller, 2008; Gibson, 1998, 2000; Gordon et al., 2001, 2004; Grodner & Gibson, 2005; King & Just, 1991; Lewis & Vasishth, 2005; Lewis et al., 2006; McElree et al., 2003; Wanner & Maratsos, 1978). According to one prominent class of accounts (experience-based accounts; e.g., Hale, 2001; Levy, 2008; Gennari & MacDonald, 2008, 2009; Wells et al., 2009), certain structures cause comprehension difficulty due to their scarcity in the language. But why are some structures less frequent than others? In two elicited-production experiments we investigated syntactic complexity effects in relative clauses (Experiment 1) and wh-questions (Experiment 2) varying in whether or not they contained non-local dependencies. In both experiments, we found reliable durational differences between subject-extracted structures (which only contain local dependencies) and object-extracted structures (which contain nonlocal dependencies): Participants took longer to begin and produce object-extractions. Furthermore, participants were more likely to be disfluent in the object-extracted constructions. These results suggest that there is a cost associated with planning and uttering the more syntactically complex, object-extracted structures, and that this cost manifests in the form of longer durations and disfluencies. Although the precise nature of this cost remains to be determined, these effects provide one plausible explanation for the relative rarity of object-extractions: They are more costly to produce.

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          Author and article information

          Journal
          Cogn Sci
          Cognitive science
          1551-6709
          0364-0213
          Apr 2015
          : 39
          : 3
          Affiliations
          [1 ] Department of Psychology, Stanford University.
          Article
          10.1111/cogs.12168
          25256303
          1ff2be68-7a88-44d8-88df-06e2bc5c8d4e
          Copyright © 2014 Cognitive Science Society, Inc.
          History

          Relative clauses,Sentence processing,Sentence production,Syntactic complexity,Wh-questions,Working memory

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