title: Syntactic Complexity Effects in Sentence Production: A Reply to MacDonald, Montag, and Gennari (2016).
abstract: In our article, "Syntactic complexity effects in sentence production" (Scontras, Badecker, Shank, Lim, & Fedorenko, ), we reported two elicited production experiments and argued that there is a cost associated with planning and uttering syntactically complex, object-extracted structures that contain a non-local syntactic dependency. MacDonald et al. () have argued that the results of our investigation provide little new information on the topic. We disagree. Examining the production of subject versus object extractions in two constructions across two experimental paradigms-relative clauses in Experiment 1 and wh-questions in Experiment 2-we found a strikingly similar pattern: reliable differences in latency and word durations, as well as in rates of disfluencies, signaling a greater cost associated with planning and uttering the syntactically more complex object extractions. MacDonald et al. reject that interpretation, namely that the differences we observed in the production of subject versus object extractions demonstrate asymmetric production difficulties. Here we address the concerns they raise by clarifying confusion and presenting novel experimental evidence in support of our original claims.
authors.affiliation: Department of Linguistics, University of California, Irvine.
authors.forename: Gregory
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Scontras
authors.affiliation: Cognitive Science Program, University of Arizona.
authors.forename: William
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Badecker
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School.|Massachusetts General Hospital.
authors.forename: Evelina
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Fedorenko
mesh_terms: D006801:Humans; D008037:Linguistics
keywords: Animacy; Passive constructions; Relative clauses; Sentence production; Syntactic complexity; wh-questions