The Manner Of Lexical Selection In Chinese Sentence Production

Language production involves three stages of processing,the stage of conceptualizing,seen as a generator of preverbal message which includes all the conceptual information of what speakers want to include,the stage of formulating that consists of grammatical encoding and phonological encoding and the stage of articulating the final sentence.It is generally accepted that production proceeds incrementally.Among them,grammatical encoding consists of lexical retrieval which involves retrieving lemmas corresponding to the concepts in the prepared message and building syntactic structure which involves the elaboration of early sentence structure.Most of the previous studies in grammatical encoding examined how large the planning scope is,i.e.whether the planning scope is as small as a lexical word,or large enough to accommodate more elements,or the planning scope is flexible,which remains a controversial issue.Relatively little is known about the manner of lexical selecting process,specially whether the scope of lexical planning in language production is mediated by hierarchical relationships or by the linear sequences of the utterance.Moreover,this concerning issue seemingly has rarely been touched in empirical studies in Chinese production.Then,the present study touched upon this issue and put forward the following research question: is the lexical selection at the grammatical encoding level in Chinese sentence production constrained by hierarchical relationships of words or by the linear sequences?In two experiments,we used the paradigm developed by Brown-Schmidt,in which speakers describe objects in complex displays using Chinese ambiguous relative clause.In Experiment 1,participants were given 5 seconds to preview each complex display and then were to describe critical pictures using the target sentence frame“??A???B?C(Click on the C of the B that is below the A)”.In Experiment 2,participants were requested to describe similar pictures but without the 5-s preview period and the preamble phrase(“??”)from the target sentence frame.Speech onset times and word durations in both experiments were then compared and analyzed.The attachment ambiguity enabled us to manipulate the hierarchical structure of the sentence while holding linear order constant.The codability of the high noun C enabled us to tap into the time-course of lemma selection of C during sentence production.The two experiments together found that: 1)the significant effect of codability was only found in low nouns(B)in both experiments,which suggests that the lexical planning of Chinese production follows a linear strategy,a linear incremental planning regardless of the mediation of hierarchical relationships and time limitation;2)the attachment effect was found at the region of relative clause in Experiment 1 and on the speech latencies in Experiment 2,suggesting that the planning scope of lemma selection and syntactic building may not coincide and syntactic building incrementality is more flexible;3)speakers participated in the lexical retrieval processes,followed by formulation of early sentence structures,and the syntactic formulation is flexible and mediated by the structure to be produced and time pressure.