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Related Concept Videos

Components of Language01:24

Components of Language

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Language, whether spoken, signed, or written, consists of specific components: lexicon and grammar. The lexicon is the vocabulary of a language, comprising its words. Grammar is the set of rules used to convey meaning through the lexicon. For example, English grammar adds “-ed” to most verbs to indicate past tense. Words are formed by combining phonemes, which are the basic sound units of a language. Different languages have different sets of phonemes (e.g., “ah” vs.
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Syntactic complexity effects in sentence production.

Gregory Scontras1, William Badecker, Lisa Shank

  • 1Department of Psychology, Stanford University.

Cognitive Science
|September 27, 2014
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Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

Syntactic complexity impacts language production. Object-extracted structures, which are less common, take longer to produce and result in more disfluencies, suggesting a production cost.

Keywords:
Relative clausesSentence processingSentence productionSyntactic complexityWh-questionsWorking memory

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Area of Science:

  • Psycholinguistics
  • Cognitive Science
  • Computational Linguistics

Background:

  • Syntactic complexity effects on language comprehension are well-documented.
  • Experience-based accounts suggest structure scarcity causes comprehension difficulty.
  • The production mechanisms underlying structure frequency remain unclear.

Purpose of the Study:

  • Investigate syntactic complexity effects in language production.
  • Examine the production costs of non-local dependencies in relative clauses and wh-questions.
  • Provide an explanation for the rarity of certain syntactic structures.

Main Methods:

  • Conducted two elicited-production experiments.
  • Focused on relative clauses (Experiment 1) and wh-questions (Experiment 2).
  • Compared subject-extracted (local dependencies) and object-extracted (non-local dependencies) structures.

Main Results:

  • Object-extracted structures showed reliable longer production durations.
  • Participants exhibited increased disfluencies in object-extracted constructions.
  • These findings indicate a production cost for syntactically complex structures.

Conclusions:

  • Object-extractions incur a planning and utterance cost.
  • This production cost likely contributes to the lower frequency of object-extracted structures.
  • The study offers insights into the relationship between production difficulty and syntactic rarity.