Friday, May 09, 2008
12:30 PM
CSB 209
Carlos Gómez Gallo
University of Rochester
Syntactic Production across Clauses
Language production research has focused on planning at the
lexical and syntactic levels. Consequently, little is known
about speakers' strategies for distributing information across
multiple utterances. We present evidence that (a) the overall
amount of information in an intended message affects how
speakers distribute that information across clauses, and (b)
speakers have relatively early access to (at least an estimate of)
message complexity, specifically before word retrieval. The
observed effect is unexpected for competing theories of sentence production based on availability or macro-propositional
accounts. We discuss these findings in an information theoretic
context coupled with a sketch of a model of limited resources
at the level of macro-propositional planning.