title: Syntactic flexibility and competition in sentence production: the case of English and Russian.
abstract: We analysed how syntactic flexibility influences sentence production in two different languages-English and Russian. In Experiment 1, speakers were instructed to produce as many structurally different descriptions of transitive-event pictures as possible. Consistent with the syntactically more flexible Russian grammar, Russian participants produced more descriptions and used a greater variety of structures than their English counterparts. In Experiment 2, a different sample of participants provided single-sentence descriptions of the same picture materials while their eye movements were recorded. In this task, English and Russian participants almost exclusively produced canonical subject-verb-object active-voice structures. However, Russian participants took longer to plan their sentences, as reflected in longer sentence onset latencies and eye-voice spans for the sentence-initial subject noun. This cross-linguistic difference in processing load diminished toward the end of the sentence. Stepwise generalized linear model analyses showed that the greater sentence-initial processing load registered in Experiment 2 corresponded to the greater amount of syntactic competition from available alternatives (Experiment 1), suggesting that syntactic flexibility is costly regardless of the language in use.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. andriy.myachykov@northumbria.ac.uk
authors.forename: Andriy
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Myachykov
authors.forename: Christoph
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Scheepers
authors.forename: Simon
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Garrod
authors.forename: Dominic
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Thompson
authors.forename: Olga
authors.initials: O
authors.lastname: Fedorova
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D005133:Eye Movements / Q000502:physiology; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D016014:Linear Models; D008037:Linguistics / Q000379:methods; D008297:Male; D016743:Mental Competency; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D011930:Reaction Time / Q000502:physiology; D012660:Semantics