Effects of event participant preview and patient animacy in sentence production: a cross-linguistic comparison between English and Russian

Theories of sentence planning (Linear vs. Hierarchical Incrementality) differ in their assumptions about how much conceptual information speakers require to initiate linguistic encoding. This picture description study tested whether speakers' selection of starting points for their sentences is influenced by the availability of information about a referent (perceptual accessibility) and by referent animacy (conceptual accessibility) in English and Russian, two languages differing in syntactic flexibility, case marking and other typological features. Target pictures showed transitive events with animate agents and animate/inanimate patients. One of the referents was previewed for 300 ms before presentation of the full picture. This preview manipulation was intended to enable earlier conceptual and lexical encoding of the first referent relative to the second referent. The frequency of agent-first structures and speech onset times (SOT) were compared between conditions as well as across the course of the experiment. The results showed that the likelihood of speakers producing agent-first responses (1) dropped when patient referents are previewed, (2) dropped when patient referents are animate, and (3) changed over the course of the experiment in English and Russian in different ways. Analyses of speech onsets of agent-first sentences also showed increases in processing costs in conditions where animate patients were previewed, consistent with a revision process taking place after early encoding of a referent that was not ultimately produced in sentence-initial position. Taken together, the findings suggest that both speaker groups engaged in linearly incremental encoding (i.e. reliance on minimal conceptual information to begin planning) to some extent, and that reliance on this planning strategy can change over time. The results are also discussed in the context of the Production-Distribution-Comprehension account.