Linguistics: Complex Sentence Structure

Language Production

• Producing complex sentences requires more computational resources and leads to longer speech initiation times compared to simple sentences.
• Syntactic priming studies show that hearing a certain sentence structure can prime the use of that same structure, leading to faster speech initiation times for primed structures.

Sentence Planning

• Sentence planning involves linking the speaker's intended meaning to the linguistic representation that expresses it.
• This includes organizing words into an appropriate syntactic structure, as meaning relies on both lexical items and their structural relationships.
• Speech errors reveal the psychological reality of linguistic representations at the word, morpheme, and sentence planning levels.

The Speaking Process

• The speaker has an intention to communicate an idea or convey some information, known as a "preverbal message".
• The speaker consults the lexicon and grammar to turn this preverbal message into a linguistic representation.
• The key steps in the speaking process are: preverbal message, semantic representation, lexical retrieval, syntactic encoding, morphological encoding, and phonetic/prosodic encoding.

Phonological Representation

• The words are "spelling out" as phonemes, and phonological and morphophonological rules are applied to produce a final sequence of phonological elements.
• This phonological representation specifies the prosodic characteristics of how the sentence is to be uttered.

Motor Execution

• The final phonological representation is translated into instructions for the vocal apparatus from the motor control areas of the brain.
• This generates the actual speech signal to be produced.

Bilingual Language Production

• In a unilingual mode, only the grammar and lexical items of the active language are accessed.
• In a bilingual mode, access to both language grammars and lexicons is required.
• Bilingual speakers can intentionally switch between languages (code-switching) or experience unintentional language slips.

Lexical Retrieval

• The process of language production begins with a semantic representation of the intended message.
• Words can be retrieved from the lexicon based on either meaning or sound information.

Speech Rate Factors

• Conversational speech rate is influenced by factors like age, sex, nativeness, and topic familiarity.

Tip-of-the-Tongue Phenomenon

• The tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon is when the speaker knows the needed word but cannot quite retrieve its full form.
• Speakers in a tip-of-the-tongue state can often recall details like initial/final sounds, syllables, stress, and similar-sounding words.

Grammatical Encoding

• Constructing the intended sentence structure is referred to as grammatical encoding, where the speaker consults their internalized grammar.
• Speech errors provide evidence that words are represented as separate units and that sentences have a hierarchical structural organization.
• Word exchange errors typically only occur between words of the same grammatical class, not between content and function words.