"Long before short" preference in the production of a head-final language

A tendency for speakers to produce short phrases before long phrases has be en attributed to the accessibility of short phrases, and thought to reflect universal mechanisms of production. However, recent corpus analyses in Jap anese suggest that long phrases tend to be shifted ahead of short ones (Haw kins, J. (1994). A performance theory of order and constituency. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Yamashita, in press). Two on-line experiments confirmed that speakers shifted long arguments to earlier positions more th an short arguments, exhibiting a "long before short" preference. We reconci le these contradictory data from English and Japanese by a competition betw een different factors in an incremental production system. (C) 2001 Elsevie r Science B.V. All rights reserved.