Effects of lexical cues on phrase structure encoding: evidence from the production of genitives in Dutch

ABSTRACT

This paper examined the role of lexical processing in phrase structure building in sentence production. We asked whether speakers exploit a lexical cue as a lexical guide (i.e. the cued word occurs earlier in the sentence) and as a retrieval cue (i.e. a cue facilitates the retrieval of a memorised structure). In two experiments, participants recalled Dutch genitive sentences. In some recall trials, they received a lexical cue that repeated one argument of the to-be-recalled sentence. In two further experiments, participants read a genitive sentence and then generated a new one from a visually-presented triplet of arguments. The visual salience of the arguments and lexical overlap were manipulated. In all four experiments, speakers consistently started the phrase with the cued word. There was no evidence of a lexical cueing effect on structure retrieval. The findings suggest that speakers mainly exploit lexical information as a lexical guide when formulating phrase structures.

KEYWORDS:

• Sentence recall
• structural priming
• sentence structure memory
• lexical cueing

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are openly available in Open Science Framework at http://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/YQWSJ

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Informed consent was obtained for experimentation with human subjects.

Notes

1 Note that there is also a morphologically marked s-genitive in Dutch (e.g. Piet-s auto, where the -s after the possessor Piet is a possessive morpheme). Nevertheless, the morphologically marked form in Dutch is only applicable to the possessive relations where the possessor is a proper noun (Scott, 2011; van Bergen, 2011; Weerman & De Wit, 1999). The morphologically marked s-genitive was not employed in the present experiments.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by China Scholarship Council: [grant number 201606280023].