The Impact Of Lexica Frequency And Structural Priming On The Planning Scope Of Grammatical Encoding In Sentence Production

Planning scope refers to the amount of linguistic information that can be processed in parallel before overt articulation of utterances.The breadth of planning scope in sentence production is a rather controversial issue.Some studies claim that it is extensive to be a clause,some other studies suggest that it is limited to a phrase,even a single word(subphrasal).However,researchers gradually realized that planning scope is flexible and influenced by some factors.By focusing on the key factors that impose constraints on the breadth of planning scope,this study tests how word frequency and structural priming influence Chinese speakers' planning scope in sentence production.In this thesis,a picture-naming experiment was conducted to test for changes in planning scope by manipulating the ease of lexical and structural information.In the experiment,participants were asked to describe the position of three pictures using sentence “The A and the B are above the C”.The magnitude of semantic relatedness serves as a predicator of temporal overlap in the retrieval of the complex noun phrase: “The A” and “the B” are semantically related or unrelated.The semantic interference from the second word indicates the retrieval of two nouns simultaneously.To control the ease of word retrieval,the prime and target sentences begin with a high frequency or a low frequency word.To manipulate the ease of building a sentence frame,the target sentence was either structural primed or unprimed.The results showed that lexical retrieval did not impose a limit on planning scope,while structural priming extended speakers' planning scope from a word to a phrase.First,there was no interaction effect between lexical frequency and semantic relatedness,which implied that planning scope was not constrained by the ease of lexical retrieval.Second,in the production of unprimed sentences,speakers did not experience semantic interference from the second word,which indicated speakers adopted a subphrasal(a single word)planning.However,speakers were observed to be interfered from the second word when they were producing primed sentences beginning with related words,which suggested that they employed a pattern of phrasal planning.Changes in planning scope occurred in primed cases support for the accounts assuming structural incrementality.On the whole,our findings suggest that structural priming is the critical factor that imposes influences on the breadth of planning scope.The results are consistent with structural incrementality over lexical incrementality.