Language Production 539flowers) or a different one (The boy gives the flowers to the
teacher). Speakers tend to repeat the structure used on previ-
ous trials, even when the words featured in prime and target
sentences are different and even when the events are unre-
lated. The results of many such studies strongly suggest that
the priming effect arises during the positional encoding
processes (Bock, 1986; Bock & Loebell, 1990; Chang, Dell,
Bock, & Griffin, 2000).
As we have noted, grammatical encoding begins with the
assignment of lemmas to grammatical functions. This map-
ping process is largely determined by conceptual information.
In studies of functional encoding, speakers are often asked to
describe pictures of scenes or events or to recall sentences
from memory; the recall task involves the reconstruction of
the surface structure of the utterance on the basis of stored
conceptual information. Many such studies have focused on
the question of which part of the conceptual structure will be
assigned the role of grammatical subject (e.g., McDonald,
Bock, & Kelly, 1993). The results show that function assign-
ment is strongly affected by the relative availability or
salience of concepts. If a concept is very salient—for example,
because it has recently been referred to or because it is the only
concrete or animate entity to be mentioned—it is likely to be-
come the sentence subject. As soon as the subject role has been
filled, the positional processes can generate the corresponding
fragment of the phrase structure and the retrieval of the phono-
logical form of the subject noun phrase can begin.
Events or actions are often encoded in a verb. As noted
earlier, verb lemmas specify the arguments that the verbs
require. Pickering and Branigan (1998) proposed to repre-
sent this information in nodes, which receive activation from
verb lemmas. For instance, the lemma for giveis con-
nected to two syntactic nodes, one representing the NP-NP
(noun phrase–noun phrase) node and the other the NP-PP
(noun phrase–prepositional phrase) node. Selection of the
NP-NP node results in a double object construction such as
the baby gives the dog a cookie.Selection of the NP-PP node
yields a prepositional phrase structure, as in the baby gives a
cookie to the dog.
Many verbs, such as give, license more than one syntactic
structure. Speeded sentence production experiments carried
out by Ferreira (1996) show that the alternative syntactic
structures associated with verb lemmas do not compete with
each other but instead represent different options for generat-
ing sentences. This explains why, under certain conditions,
speakers are faster to complete sentences with alternator
verbs (e.g., to give) than sentences with nonalternator verbs
(e.g.,to donate). Ferreira proposed that a speaker’s choice
among the structures permitted by an alternator verb de-
pends, in part, on the salience of the lemmas assigned to the
patient and recipient roles. If the patient is very salient, the
corresponding fragment of the sentence will be built early.
This encourages the generation of an NP-NP construction in
which the patient is expressed early (give the dog a cookie).
If the direct object is highly activated, an NP-PP construction
will be more likely (give the cookie to the dog). Ferreira and
Dell (2000) proposed that in general, the choice of syntactic
structure may depend largely on the availability of lemmas
filling different thematic roles. If a lemma is highly available,
it will be processed early at the functional and positional lev-
els and will thus appear early in the sentence. Whether lemma
availability by itself is sufficient to explain how speakers
choose between alternative word orders remains to be
determined.
Certain elements within well-formed sentences must agree
with one another. In English, subject and verb must agree in
number, as must pronouns and their noun antecedents. In lan-
guages such as German, Dutch, Italian, and French, nouns
have grammatical gender, and there is gender agreement be-
tween nouns and determiners, adjectives, and pronouns.
Number agreement and grammatical gender agreement differ
in that number information usually stems from the conceptual
level, whereas grammatical gender is specified as part of the
noun lemma. Consequently, different mechanisms are likely
to be involved in generating the two types of agreement. We
briefly consider each type of agreement, beginning with
English number agreement.
In most cases, the mapping from conceptual number onto
the lemma level is straightforward: The singular form of a
noun is chosen to refer to one entity, and the plural form to
refer to two or more entities. Because number is coded at
both the conceptual and grammatical levels, speakers could
use either or both types of information to generate agreement.
What information do speakers actually use? According to a
strictly modular theory of language production, the grammat-
ical coding process should be sensitive only to grammatical
information. A more interactive theory would permit gram-
matical encoding processes to be affected by both grammati-
cal and conceptual information. To examine this issue,
researchers have studied agreement for collectivenouns such
asfleetandgang,which are exceptions to the straightforward
mapping between conceptual and grammatical number. For
example,fleetis grammatically singular but refers to a group
of ships. The studies have often used sentence completion
tasks, in which speakers hear the beginnings of sentences
(e.g.,The condition of the ship/ships/fleet/fleets...; Bock &
Eberhard, 1993), repeat the fragments, and then complete
them to form full sentences. When the two nouns in the
fragment differ in number, speakers sometimes make agree-
ment errors (The condition of the ships werepoor).