Speakers use their own discourse model to determine referents' accessibility during the production of referring expressions.

We report two experiments that investigated the widely-held assumption that speakers use the addressee's discourse model when choosing referring expressions, by manipulating whether the addressee could hear the immediately preceding linguistic context. Experiment 1 showed that speakers increased pronoun use (relative to definite NPs) when the referent was mentioned in the immediately preceding sentence compared to when it was not, but whether their addressee heard that the referent was mentioned had no effect, indicating that speakers use their own, privileged discourse model when choosing referring expressions. The same pattern of results was found in Experiment 2. Speakers produced fewer pronouns when the immediately preceding sentence mentioned a referential competitor than when it mentioned the referent, but this effect did not differ depending on whether the sentence was shared with their addressee. Thus, we conclude that choice of referring expression is determined by the referent's accessibility in the speaker’s own discourse model rather than the addressee's

Number attraction affects reanalysis in sentence processing

Many studies have shown evidence for number attraction effects in production. Recent cross-linguistic findings suggest that number attraction can also affect comprehension of ungrammatical sentences. We present an eye-tracking experiment that investigates number attraction during recovery from garden-path sentences. The sentences contrasted locally ambiguous with unambiguous structures containing a plural or a singular attractor noun before a singular verb. Reading time data from the experiment suggest that number attraction effects occur when the processor has difficulty finding a grammatical analysis: Sentences with a local ambiguity had longer regression-path times when there was a plural number attractor than when there was a singular number attractor. The attractor number did not affect the processing of the unambiguous sentences.</p

No looking back:The effects of visual cues on the lexical boost in structural priming

Four structural priming experiments investigated the lexical boost effect in structural priming. In two experiments, we tested whether repeating the subject in prepositional object or double object ditransitive structures boosted structural priming. In two other experiments, we manipulated the repetition of the verb. Repetition of the subject noun affected structural priming, but only when the prime remained visible while participants produced the target sentence. In contrast, repetition of the verb boosted priming regardless of whether participants could see the prime and target simultaneously. We conclude that the subject noun repetition effect is more strategic in nature than the verb boost effect. Structures are automatically associated with the verb, their syntactic head, whereas repetition of the subject noun only affects priming if the presentation method makes the repetition highly explicit.</p

Production of referring Eexpressions (PRE-CogSci) 2009 : bridging the gap between computational and empirical approaches to reference

How do speakers refer to entities? This question has been addressed by both psycholinguists and computational linguists. A referring expression is typically defined as one which is produced in order to identify an object or set of objects for a listener or reader, in a relevant domain of discourse. In spite of several decades of research on the topic, our understanding of it is still incomplete, in part due to a lack of communication between psycholinguists and computational linguists, a remarkable state of affairs given the substantial overlap in the topics that these practitioners have investigated. Among these topics, the following have stood out in recent years: Over- and underspecification: Why and how do speakers overspecify when they produce referring expressions? Under what conditions do they underspecify?peer-reviewe

Reference Production as Search:The Impact of Domain Size on the Production of Distinguishing Descriptions

When producing a description of a target referent in a visual context, speakers need to choose a set of properties that distinguish it from its distractors. Computational models of language production/generation usually model this as a search process and predict that the time taken will increase both with the number of distractors in a scene and with the number of properties required to distinguish the target. These predictions are reminiscent of classic ndings in visual search; however, unlike models of reference production, visual search models also predict that search can become very e cient under certain conditions, something that reference production models do not consider. This paper investigates the predictions of these models empirically. In two experiments, we show that the time taken to plan a referring expression { as re ected by speech onset latencies { is in uenced by distractor set size and by the number of properties required, but this crucially depends on the discriminability of the properties under consideration. We discuss the implications for current models of reference production and recent work on the role of salience in visual search.peer-reviewe

The head or the verb:Is the lexical boost restricted to the head verb?

Four structural priming experiments investigated whether the lexical boost is due to the repeated head verb of the primed structure or due to the repetition of any verb, testing structural priming of ditransitive structures (The hotel owner decided to loan the tourist a tent/a tent to the tourist). In Experiments 1–3, we manipulated the repetition of the matrix verb (decided) that is not the syntactic head in the primed structure. The results showed abstract structural priming of the embedded ditransitive structure but the repetition of the matrix verb did not boost the priming. In addition to manipulating the repetition of the matrix verb, we also manipulated the head verb of the primed structure (loan) in Experiment 4. It showed a lexical boost with the repetition of the head verb but no boost with the repetition of the matrix verb. These results are consistent with the residual activation model, which only predicts a boost from the verb that is the head of the primed structure. They do not support models which predict that the repetition of any lexical material in a sentence boosts priming

An investigation into the lexical boost with nonhead nouns

In five structural priming experiments, we investigated lexical boost effects in the production of ditransitive sentences. Although the residual activation model of Pickering and Branigan (1998) suggests that a lexical boost should only occur with the repetition of a syntactic licensing head in ditransitive prepositional object (PO)/double object (DO) structures, Scheepers, Raffray, and Myachykov (2017) recently found that it also occurs with the repetition of nouns that are not syntactic heads. We manipulated the repetition of the subject (Experiments 1–3), and the verb phrase (VP) internal arguments (i.e., either theme or recipient, Experiments 4–5) in PO/DO structures. In Experiment 2, the verb was also repeated between prime and target, while in the other experiments it was not. Three different tasks for eliciting the target were employed: picture description via the oral completion of a sentence fragment (Experiments 1–2, and 4), oral completion of a sentence fragment with no visual context (Experiment 3), and oral production of a sentence from a given array of words and no visual context (Experiment 5). Priming occurred in all experiments and was stronger when the verb was repeated (Experiment 2) than when it was not (Experiment 1). However, none of the experiments showed evidence that priming was stronger when either the subject or one of the VP-internal arguments was repeated. These findings support the view that structural information is associated with syntactic heads (i.e., the verb), but not with nonheads such as the subject noun and the VP-internal arguments (Pickering & Branigan, 1998)