T. Pechmann et D. Zerbst, THE EFFECT OF SYNTACTIC STRUCTURE ON THE TIME-COURSE OF DIFFERENT PROCESSES DURING SPEECH PRODUCTION, Sprache & Kognition, 14(2), 1995, pp. 64-74
Experiments studying the generation of complex noun phrases have shown
that the prenominal order of adjectives systematically affects the ti
me speakers need to initiate the articulation of such phrases (cf. Pec
hmann, 1994). Further experiments demonstrated that the differences we
obtained exclusively arise at the stage of grammatical coding. The pr
esent paper examines whether these findings also hold for the word ord
er in simple subject-predicate-object sentences. Our data confirm this
hypothesis. They support the claim that the duration of syntactic pro
cesses during speech production depends upon the <<markedness>> of syn
tactic structures. This does not hold for processes of phonological co
ding or articulation.