Incremental grammatical encoding in event descriptions

Abstract

Speech is produced incrementally. The Incremental Parallel Formulator (De Smedt, 1996) is a computational model of grammatical encoding that takes this notion of incrementality into account. It predicts that the order and time-scale with which conceptual fragments activate lexical segments affect the syntactic shape of an utterance. We derived predictions from this model and tested these in two online experiments. In these experiments, participants described computer animations in which two objects moved in upward or downward direc-tions. We manipulated the availability of pieces of the con-ceptual input by with holding either the information about the movement direction, or about the identity of one of the objects for various amounts of time. The experiments showed that both the type and the temporal availability of conceptual in-formation strongly affect the syntactic shape of an utterance.