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Speakers and typers adapt their planning strategies to meet sentence production demands
Poster Session E, Sunday, September 14, 11:00 am - 12:30 pm, Field House
Jeremy Yeaton1, Shivaa Upadhye1, Erin Yi1, Gregory Hickok1; 1University of California, Irvine
Introduction. Sentence production in both healthy and clinical populations remains understudied relative to sentence comprehension. In particular, models of supramodal planning and control mechanisms employed during sentence production remain elusive. Here, we employ a novel task--the (Non-)Sentence Repetition Task (NSRT)--which uses a multi-phase trial design to assess supramodal syntactic competence and sentence production planning in both spoken and typed production. Background. Within language production research, sentence repetition tasks have revealed the Sentence Superiority Effect (Snell & Grainger, 2017)--where a sequence of words is more accurately recalled if it is a well-formed sentence than if it is not---providing a window into grammatical encoding. Furthermore, sentence planning is sensitive to demands on cognitive load (Ferreira & Swets, 2002). Repetition of ungrammmatical sentences thus demands increased control relative to grammatical ones. Additionally, production modality places different demands on fluency, which can in turn impact cognitive load. Methods. Trials (N=60) in the NSRT occur in 3 phases: 1) auditory presentation of a sentence to judge as grammatical (N=30) or ungrammatical (N=30); 2) verbatim production of the presented sentence regardless of grammaticality; and 3) reproduction of the corrected sentence if it was judged to be ungrammatical. The stimuli used three types of morphosyntactic violations. Productions were made either via typing (N=23) or by speech (N=38). The data provide a rich corpus of language production behaviors including pauses, errors, disfluencies, and repairs. Here, we focus on two main measures of production difficulty: onset latency, and words per minute (WPM). Prior work has found that onset latency indexes the scope or difficulty of advance planning (Smith & Wheeldon, 1989). We operationalize incremental production difficulty/rate in both modalities as WPM. We predicted a tradeoff between two planning strategies: individuals who waited longer to begin production should show faster WPM due to pre-onset planning, whereas individuals who began early should show slower WPM due to the need to plan on-line. We also investigate how participants arbitrate between these two strategies as a function of production modality, phase (verbatim repetition vs. correction), and item grammaticality. Results. We found a significant inverse relationship between onset latency and WPM in both modalities. Furthermore, onset latencies were significantly slower in ungrammatical vs. grammatical sentences. By contrast, we found the opposite effect for WPM: faster production rate in ungrammatical sentences. Intriguingly, our results revealed an asymmetric effect of phase on these two measures: while onset latencies were significantly shorter during verbatim than correction, no significant difference was observed in WPM. Finally, we observed slower onset latencies and WPM when correcting sentences in speech vs. typing. Discussion. Participants exhibited a trade-off between advance planning scope and incremental production rate in both speech and typing. Participants demonstrate a similar tradeoff with slower onsets but faster WPM for ungrammatical sentences than grammatical ones. Furthermore, planning scope varied depending on both phase and output modality, whereas production rate varied only as a function of modality. These results show that individuals flexibly adapt their planning strategies to meet sentence production demands.
Topic Areas: Language Production, Control, Selection, and Executive Processes