Speaker: Shota Momma (UMass Amherst)
Title: A theory of structure building in speaking
Time: Tuesday, March 12th, 1pm – 2pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract: Partly due to our free will, our ability to produce sentences is notoriously hard to study. Existing theories of sentence production are not very good at capturing how speakers assemble structurally complex sentences that involve syntactically interesting phenomena. In this talk, I attempt to fill this gap by developing a theory of sentence production that integrates well with theories of syntax. This model aims to capture the production of sentences involving various syntactic phenomena, including raising, control, and wh-movement dependencies, and suggests a close parallelism between locality domain for syntactic computations and planning units in sentence production. The proposed theory makes counter-intuitive predictions about the time-course of sentence formulation as well as one of the most well-studied phenomena in sentence production: structural priming. I present experimental evidence confirming those predictions.