Grammatical and phonological influences on word order

Area of Science:

• Psycholinguistics
• Cognitive Science
• Linguistics

Background:

• Word order in spoken language relies on grammatical class information for some structures (e.g., adjective-noun).
• However, grammatical class alone is insufficient for determining word order in other structures (e.g., noun-noun).
• The role of phonological properties in grammatical encoding remains less understood.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the influence of phonological properties on grammatical encoding during spoken multiword utterance production.
• To determine if manipulating word onset phonology affects word sequencing.

Main Methods:

• Four experiments were conducted involving participants producing multiword utterances.
• Participants' utterances featured manipulated phonological onset relatedness between words.
• Utterance types included noun-noun, noun-adjective, adjective-noun, noun-verb, and adjective-adjective-noun constructions.

Main Results:

• Phonological-onset relatedness showed inhibitory effects in noun-noun utterances.
• No significant effects were observed in noun-adjective utterances.
• Facilitatory effects were found in adjective-noun, noun-verb, and adjective-adjective-noun utterances.

Conclusions:

• Grammatical encoding processes are sensitive to the phonological properties of words.
• Phonology plays a distinct role in word sequencing, varying across different grammatical constructions.
• These findings challenge explanations solely based on stimulus display differences and highlight phonology's contribution to speech production.