Scope of Message Planning: Evidence From Production of Sentences With Heavy Sentence‐Final NPs

TL;DR

This study explores how much information speakers plan before forming sentences, showing that they consider both the beginning and end of a sentence early on.

Contribution

The study provides new evidence that message-level planning includes conceptual details about both sentence-initial and sentence-final elements.

Findings

Speech onsets and eye movements indicate early planning of sentence-final characters.

Speakers incorporate information about both sentence-initial and sentence-final elements during message-level planning.

The complexity of sentence-final characters affects speech production timing.

Abstract

Speaking begins with the generation of a preverbal message. While a common assumption is that the scope of message‐level planning (i.e., the size of message‐level increments) can be more extensive than the scope of sentence‐level planning, it is unclear how much information is typically encoded at the message level in advance of sentence‐level planning during spontaneous production. This study assessed the scope and granularity of early message‐level planning in English by tracking production of sentences with light versus heavy sentence‐final NPs. Speakers produced SVO sentences to describe pictures showing an agent acting on a patient. Half of the pictures showed one‐patient events, eliciting sentences with unmodified patient names (e.g., “The tailor is cutting the dress”), and half showed two‐patient events with a target patient and a non‐target patient. The presence of a non‐target patient required production of a prenominal or postnominal modifier to uniquely identify the target patient (e.g., “The tailor is cutting the long dress” / “the dress with sleeves”). Analyses of speech onsets and eye movements before speech onset showed strong effects of the complexity of the sentence‐final character, suggesting that early message‐level planning does not proceed strictly word by word (or “from left to right”) but instead includes basic information about the identity of both the sentence‐initial and sentence‐final characters. This is consistent with theories that assume extensive message‐level planning before the start of sentence‐level encoding and provides new evidence about the level of conceptual detail incorporated into early message plans.

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