Effect of ambiguity and lexical availability on syntactic and lexical production

Speakers only sometimes include the that in sentence complement structures like The coach knew (that) you missed practice. Six experiments tested the predictions concerning optional word mention of two general approaches to l anguage production. One approach claims that language production processes choose syntactic structures that ease the task of creating sentences, so th at words an spoken opportunistically, as they are selected for production. The second approach claims that a syntactic structure is chosen that is eas iest to comprehend, so that optional words like that are used to avoid temp orarily ambiguous, difficult-to-comprehend sentences. in all experiments, s peakers did not consistently include optional words to circumvent a tempora ry ambiguity, but they did omit optional words (the complementizer that) wh en subsequent material was either repeated (within a sentence) or prompted with a recall cue. The results suggest that speakers choose syntactic struc tures to permit early mention of available material and not to circumvent d isruptive temporary ambiguities. (C) 2000 Academic Press.