Planning ahead: How recent experience with structures and words changes the scope of linguistic planning

The scope of linguistic planning, or the amount of linguistic information that speakers can prepare in advance for an utterance they are about to produce, is highly variable. Distinguishing between possible sources of this variability provides a way to discriminate between accounts of language production that assume structurally incremental and lexically incremental planning. Four picture-naming experiments evaluated changes in speakers' planning scope as a function of experience with sentence structures and lexical items. On target trials participants produced sentences beginning with two semantically related or unrelated objects in the same complex noun phrase (Experiments 1, 3, and 4) or in separate phrases (Experiment 2). To manipulate familiarity with sentence structure, target displays were preceded by prime displays that elicited the same or different sentence structures. To manipulate ease of lexical retrieval, target sentences began either with the high-frequency or low-frequency member of each semantic pair. The results show that structural priming can extend speakers' scope of planning to include two words in a complex noun phrase, as indexed by the presence of semantic interference in primed sentences beginning with easily retrievable words. Changes in planning scope tied to experience with phrasal structures favor accounts assuming structural planning in early sentence formulation.