Department of Psychology, Harvard University, United States.
Cognition. 2013 Dec;129(3):544-62. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2013.08.007. Epub 2013 Sep 14.
It is generally assumed that language production proceeds incrementally, with chunks of linguistic structure planned ahead of speech. Extensive research has examined the scope of language production and suggests that the size of planned chunks varies across contexts (Ferreira & Swets, 2002; Wagner & Jescheniak, 2010). By contrast, relatively little is known about the structure of advance planning, specifically whether planning proceeds incrementally according to the surface structure of the utterance, or whether speakers plan according to the hierarchical relationships between utterance elements. In two experiments, we examine the structure and scope of lexical planning in language production using a picture description task. Analyses of speech onset times and word durations show that speakers engage in hierarchical planning such that structurally dependent lexical items are planned together and that hierarchical planning occurs for both direct and indirect dependencies.
人们通常认为语言产生是逐步进行的，语言结构的块在说话之前就已经计划好了。大量的研究已经考察了语言产生的范围，并表明计划的块的大小因上下文而异（Ferreira 和 Swets，2002；Wagner 和 Jescheniak，2010）。相比之下，人们对提前计划的结构知之甚少，特别是计划是否是根据话语的表面结构逐步进行的，或者说话者是否是根据话语元素之间的层次关系进行计划的。在两项实验中，我们使用图片描述任务来研究语言产生中词汇计划的结构和范围。对语音起始时间和单词时长的分析表明，说话者进行层次规划，使得结构上相关的词汇项一起被计划，并且层次规划适用于直接和间接的依存关系。
