THE EFFECT OF SYNTACTIC STRUCTURE ON THE TIME-COURSE OF DIFFERENT PROCESSES DURING SPEECH PRODUCTION

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.