| Abstract: | The study was conducted to determine, first, whether it is the deep or the surface clause that is more important as a speech planning unit, and second, whether syntactic decisions are made during sentence production. Subjects, while talking, heard tones to which they had to respond by pressing a button; reaction times to these tones were taken as an index of processing load during production. It was found that there were increased RTs at the ends compared with the beginnings of deep structure clauses. No difference was found between RTs at the beginnings and ends of surface clauses not corresponding to a deep clause. The results were interpreted as showing that deep clauses are major planning units and that some planning for clauses occurs at the end of the preceding clause. Differences were found between RTs during clauses of different syntactic structure. These results were interpreted as indicating that syntax influences production and were discussed in relation to previous studies of pausing and speech disruption. |
