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Journal of Memory and Language 48 (2003) 379–398 Journal of Memory and Language www.elsevier.com/locate/jml The persistence of optional complementizer production: Why saying ‘‘that’’ is not saying ‘‘that’’ at all Victor S. Ferreira Department of Psychology 0109, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093-0109, USA Received 19 March 2002; revision received 10 July 2002 Abstract What kinds of processing mechanisms determine the forms of spoken sentences? Three experiments (N ¼ 176) measured whether the mention of an optional that in a sentence-complement structure (‘‘The mechanic mentioned (that) the car could use a tune-up’’) can be primed by the prior production of a sentence that included a lexically or a lexically and syntactically similar that, using a recall-based sentence-production task. Results showed that target thatmention was influenced by primes with lexically and syntactically similar thats (sentence-complement primes with versus without thats), but not by primes with only lexically similar thats (transitive primes with determiner thats, ‘‘The company insured that farm for. . .,’’ or noun-complement primes with complementizer thats, ‘‘The theory that. . .’’). Also, compared to neutral primes, sentence-complement primes without thats decreased target that-mention more than sentence-complement primes with thats increased it. This suggests that complementizer-persistence specifically and sentence-production generally includes an autonomous, lexically independent syntactic processing component. Ó 2002 Elsevier Science (USA). All rights reserved. Keywords: Psycholinguistics; Language production; Sentence processing; Syntactic processing; Syntactic priming; Complementizer processing The hallmark of linguistic ability is its creativity: speakers and listeners process utterances they have never encountered before. An important prerequisite for such creativity is a separation between lexical content and syntactic structure (see Bock, 1987a). Lexical content denotes states, entities, and activities in the world, and thereby communicates semantic information: who, what, and whom. Syntactic structure determines how the words in a sentence should be organized with respect to one another, and thereby communicates relational information: who did what to whom. Importantly, if lexical content and syntactic structure are separate and autonomous (even if mutually influential), then linguistic creativity could result from combining known lexical E-mail address: [email protected] content with known syntactic structures to create novel linguistic utterances.1 That said, the abstractness of syntactic structure raises questions about whether it is indeed processed independently of lexical content. While the fields of language comprehension and acquisition have at times adopted approaches that give syntactic processes an autonomous and independent role in language use (e.g., Frazier & Fodor, 1978; Pinker, 1984), some 1 Note that for grammar to be productive—for language users to be able to process an indefinite set of utterances—it must be generative, so that a finite set of ÔrulesÕ can create an indefinite set of utterances. For a generative grammar to even get off the ground, however, language users must first represent a separation between the syntax and the words in the language they experience (i.e., between structure and content). 0749-596X/02/$ - see front matter Ó 2002 Elsevier Science (USA). All rights reserved. PII: S 0 7 4 9 - 5 9 6 X ( 0 2 ) 0 0 5 2 3 - 5 380 V.S. Ferreira / Journal of Memory and Language 48 (2003) 379–398 recent proposals have argued that syntactic structures are processed in a concrete and item-based manner, dependent upon representations of individual words and how they are used (e.g., MacDonald, Pearlmutter, & Seidenberg, 1994; Tomasello, 2000). Importantly, such lexically based approaches attempt to explain much of the evidence for autonomous syntactic processing by assuming that syntactic influences, if operative at all, can be seen as derived from lexical influences. In the field of language production, evidence for an autonomous syntax might come from a phenomenon here termed structural persistence2 or syntactic priming. This refers to speakersÕ tendency to repeat the general forms of previously processed sentences. For example, a speaker who hears or produces a passive prime sentence (e.g., ‘‘the dog was chased by the cat’’) is especially likely to then produce a passive target sentence (‘‘the cow was kicked by the horse’’) rather than a corresponding active (‘‘the horse kicked the cow’’; e.g., Bock, 1986a). To the extent that such persistence is due to the repetition of lexically independent syntactic structures, it would constitute evidence for autonomous syntactic processing (see Pickering & Branigan, 1999, for review). Current evidence suggests that structural persistence may reflect pure syntactic repetition. Some non-syntactic factors that are correlated with differences in syntactic structure have no effect on structural persistence (e.g., prosodic or thematic structure; Bock & Loebell, 1990; Bock, Loebell, & Morey, 1992), whereas others have a strictly additive effect (e.g., whether a subject argument is animate or inanimate; Bock et al., 1992). Other nonsyntactic factors can influence the size of the structural persistence effect (e.g., whether the task involves a dialogue between interlocutors; Branigan, Pickering, & Cleland, 2000) or its longevity (e.g., whether production is spoken or written; Branigan, Pickering, & Cleland, 1999), but since such factors are not correlated with syntactic structure distinctions, they cannot explain the syntactic repetition itself. However, one non-syntactic influence on structural persistence raises the possibility that syntactic repetition may be lexically dependent. Pickering and Branigan (1998) showed that the repetition of content words— meaningful open-class nouns, verbs, and adjectives— from prime to target sentences enhances structural persistence. This influence of lexical repetition on structural persistence may be a kind of lexical accessibility effect, whereby highly accessible words (e.g., 2 In this paper, structural persistence is used to describe the empirical effect whereby speakers tend to repeat sentence forms. Representational bases for structural persistence are described in terms of repetition, such as syntactic or lexical repetition. recently produced or semantically primed words; Bock, 1986b; Perfetti & Goldman, 1975) tend to exert a greater influence on sentence production than less accessible words. Of course, the accessibility-driven repetition of content words itself cannot underlie syntactic repetition. This is both because structural persistence has been observed without content-word repetition (e.g., Bock, 1986a; Pickering & Branigan, 1998), and because content-word distinctions are not correlated with syntactic-structure distinctions (e.g., an active and its corresponding passive do not contain different content words, they only position those content words differently). However, an accessibility-driven repetition of function words—short, high-frequency, closed-class words like by, to, and that—might underlie syntactic repetition. This is because function-word distinctions are correlated with syntactic structure distinctions. For example, a passive structure will tend to include the same pattern of was and by (‘‘the dog was chased by the cat’’) as another passive (‘‘the cow was kicked by the horse’’), but not as a corresponding active (‘‘the horse kicked the cow’’). Thus, the mention of the distinctive function words in a prime sentence might enhance their accessibility, leading to their increased likelihood of mention, thereby causing speakers to produce a target structure with those function words. Importantly, such function-word repetition would constitute a lexically based explanation of structural persistence (e.g., Hare & Goldberg, 1998). Current evidence about whether function-word repetition can influence structural persistence is mixed. On the one hand, structural persistence sometimes occurs independently of the repetition of distinctive function words. For example, Bock (1989) found equivalent priming of prepositional-dative targets (‘‘The girl is handing a paintbrush to the man’’) over double-object targets (‘‘The girl is handing the man a paintbrush’’) from prepositional dative primes with the same preposition (to, as in ‘‘A cheerleader offered a seat to her friend’’) as from prepositional-dative primes with a different preposition (for, as in ‘‘A cheerleader saved a seat for her friend’’). Also, in Dutch, Hartsuiker, Kolk, and Huiskamp (1999) found that after inverted primes (e.g., ‘‘Een boek ligt op de plank,’’ ÔA book lies on the shelfÕ) speakers produced more inverted targets than after non-inverted primes (e.g., ‘‘Op de plank ligt een boek,’’ ÔOn the shelf lies a book,Õ), despite the fact that the two kinds of primes do not include distinctive function words. Finally, Pickering, Branigan, and McLean (2002) found that after shifted prepositional-dative primes (e.g., ‘‘The racing driver showed to the mechanic the dirty overalls’’), speakers were not more likely to produce prepositional dative targets (shifted or otherwise) than after double-object primes (‘‘The racing driver showed the mechanic the V.S. Ferreira / Journal of Memory and Language 48 (2003) 379–398 dirty overalls’’), despite the distinct function words in those two primes. On the other hand, other evidence could be viewed as consistent with an influence of function-word repetition on structural persistence. Bock and Loebell (1990) found equivalent priming of passive targets (e.g., ‘‘The boy was awakened by the alarm clock’’) over actives (‘‘The alarm clock awakened the boy’’) after non-passive locative primes (e.g., ‘‘The 747 was landing by the control tower’’) as after passive primes (‘‘The 747 was landed by the control tower’’). While Bock and Loebell interpreted this as a syntactic repetition effect (under the assumption that locatives and passives are not syntactically distinct), a plausible alternative explanation is that the distinctive function words in the locatives and passives (‘‘The 747 was landed/landing by. . .’’) led such primes to cause equivalent increased passive target production (Hare & Goldberg, 1998; see also Bencini, Bock, & Goldberg, 2002). It is worth noting in this regard that Potter and Lombardi (1998) found that locatives primed less than true passives (though they still primed significantly), hinting that the (possibly) syntactically distinct locatives prime differently from the syntactically identical passives. Furthermore, Levelt and Kelter (1982) found (in Dutch) that when shopkeepers were asked questions with particular prepositions (e.g., ÔAt what time do you close?Õ) they were more likely to answer with a preposition (ÔAt 5:00Õ) than without (Ô5:00Õ), an effect they interpreted as being due to the repetition of the preposition per se. One reason for this inconsistent picture may be that all structural persistence investigations conducted to date have looked at structures that involve distinct word orders. This may be important, as alternatives such as prepositional datives versus double-object datives may be semantically or stylistically distinct, and such distinctions may themselves prime (independently of lexical or syntactic repetition) and thereby obscure the influence of function-word repetition. Furthermore, passives specifically may have revealed an effect of function-word repetition (Bock & Loebell, 1990), because the distinctive function words in passives occur early and involve main-verb morphology, which may be used when deciding upon the form of a sentence (e.g., F. Ferreira, 2000). In sum, whereas function-word repetition may not be necessary to get structural persistence, it may be sufficient; in particular, function-word repetition may cause structural persistence at least when syntactic repetition per se seems evident. An ideal way to definitively determine the role of function-word repetition in structural persistence is to look at a structural alternation that involves the simple mention or omission of a function word with as few other concomitant sentence changes as possible. One such structural alternation arises with the production of 381 the sentence-complement structure, such as ‘‘The mechanic mentioned (that) the car could use a tune-up.’’ In such structures, a speaker can produce or omit a function-word complementizer ‘‘that’’ after the main verb but before the embedded clause, without any obvious accompanying word order, thematic, or semanticfeature changes. Thus, if speakers have any tendency to repeat function words from one sentence to the next, it should be evident when they produce sentence-complement structures: when speakers produce the word that once, they should tend to produce the word that again. Of course, the mention of a that in a sentencecomplement structure may also be syntactic. That is, a sentence-complement structure with versus without a that may differ in how syntactic processes form the lexically independent syntactic structure of each kind of sentence. If so, any tendency to repeat thats from one sentence to the next may be due to syntactic repetition rather than to lexical repetition. Thus, to determine whether speakers tend to repeat function words per se from one sentence to the next, the three experiments presented below had speakers produce sentence-complement structures in a standard prime–target structural-persistence paradigm, manipulating the properties of the thats that speakers can repeat from one sentence to the next. If the tendency to repeat thats is due to lexical repetition, then speakers should repeat thats from one sentence to the next whenever lexical properties of the that can be repeated. On the other hand, if a tendency to repeat thats is due to syntactic repetition, then speakers should only repeat thats whenever the syntactic context of the that can also be repeated. To elicit prime and target sentences with a sufficient variety of sentence-complement-taking verbs and with some constraint over the structures speakers produced, a recall-based methodology was used, illustrated in Fig. 1 below. Speakers recalled and produced complete sentences shortly after encoding those sentences into memory. Recall-based sentence-production tasks like these exploit the fact that generally, a sentenceÕs meaning is remembered much better than its form (e.g., Sachs, 1967). This suggests that when speakers recall complete sentences, the meaning of the recalled sentence will be constrained by the meaning of the originally encoded sentence (thereby providing control over content), while the form of the recalled sentence will vary more freely. Indeed, many experiments have shown that the forms of produced sentences in recall-based tasks like these vary in a manner that reflects the organization of knowledge within the language production system (e.g., Bock & Irwin, 1980; Bock & Warren, 1985; Ferreira & Dell, 2000; Fox Tree & Meijer, 1999; Lombardi & Potter, 1992; Potter & Lombardi, 1990, 1998). Furthermore, such recall tasks only weakly involve formulating propositional content; thus, any observed effects can be 382 V.S. Ferreira / Journal of Memory and Language 48 (2003) 379–398 Fig. 1. Procedure for critical trials in Experiments 1 and 2. All screens separated by a 1 s interval. Speakers read each sentence out loud upon initial presentation. At each prompt, speakers were instructed to remember as much of the sentence as possible that included the prompted words. ascribed to syntactic formulation rather than to processes that formulate propositional content. Experiment 1 Speakers produced sentence-complement targets (e.g., ‘‘The mechanic mentioned (that) the car could use a tune-up’’) after they produced either sentence-complement primes with or without a complementizer that (e.g., ‘‘The company insured (that) the farm was covered for two million dollars’’) or after transitive primes with or without a determiner that (e.g., ‘‘The company insured that/the farm for two million dollars.’’). If complementizer mention is sensitive to priming at all, then when speakers produce a complementizer that in a sentence-complement prime, they should be likely to produce another phonologically, lexically, and syntactically identical complementizer that in a sentencecomplement target. Furthermore, if such priming is due at least partially to the repetition of the phonology of the that, then when speakers produce a determiner that in a transitive prime, they should also then be more likely to produce a phonologically near-identical but lexically and syntactically distinct complementizer that in a sentence-complement target (i.e., this would show that in the terminology of some theories of lexical production—Cutting & Ferreira, 1999; Dell, 1986; Levelt, Roelofs, & Meyer, 1999—producing a ‘‘that’’ lexeme is sufficient to get function-word repetition). Phonological accessibility has been observed to affect word order (e.g., Bock, 1987b; Pinker & Birdsong, 1979), so it may be that just the accessible phonology of a function word (as determined by its use in a previous sentence) could elicit function-word repetition and thereby provide a lexical account of the structural persistence effect. Method Speakers. Sixty-four members of the UCSD community participated for class credit or cash payment. All reported learning English as their first language. Apparatus. Stimuli were presented and responses collected using PsyScope 1.2.5 (Cohen, MacWhinney, Flatt, & Provost, 1993), run on Macintosh 6500/250 computers with 17-in. Applevision 750AV color monitors set to a resolution of 832 624. Voice responses were collected with Shure SM10A unidirectional headworn microphones inputting to Marantz PMD201 cassette recorders and PsyScope response boxes. The voice key was calibrated separately for each speaker. Procedure. Speakers were tested individually. The primed sentence-recall procedure is illustrated in Fig. 1. On each critical trial, speakers encoded first the target sentence into memory (e.g., ‘‘The mechanic mentioned the antique car could use a tune-up’’), and then the prime (‘‘The company insured that the farm was covered for two million dollars’’). Speakers then produced the prime sentence when prompted by its main subject and verb (‘‘company insured’’), and finally they produced the target when prompted similarly (‘‘mechanic mentioned’’). Note that this nested V.S. Ferreira / Journal of Memory and Language 48 (2003) 379–398 pattern of encoding and recall maximizes recency for production of the prime but minimizes recency for production of the target; thus, speakersÕ prime productions should be likely to accurately reproduce the originally encoded sentence, while their target productions should be more variable (so that production of the target can be influenced by production of the prime). All stimuli were presented in bold Courier 14-point font, centered vertically and horizontally on the screen. An equal number of filler trials were also used with the identical trial structure as the criticals, except that the sentences were prompted in the opposite order, so that across the entire experiment, speakers could not anticipate which sentence they would be prompted to produce first. The main experiment was preceded by an instruction session that included a sample sentence pair and a practice block of five sentence pairs. Sample and practice sentences were similar to the fillers. The entire experiment took about 40 min. Materials and design. Forty-eight sentence-complement structures and matched transitive structures were generated from verbs normed by Garnsey, Lotocky, and McConkie (1992). Sentence-complement structures were created by combining each verb with a unique main subject and embedded clause, with and without the optional complementizer that. A transitive sentence was created for each verb with the same main subject as in the corresponding sentence complement, followed by a direct object. One transitive version included the determiner that after the verb, while the other included the determiner the. The 48 sentence sets of four sentences were paired into 24 meaning-unrelated pairs for prime–target presentation. All critical materials for all experiments are reported in the Appendix. In addition, 24 dative sentences were created (based on materials in Ferreira, 1996) to serve as a basis of comparison to previous studies of sentence-to-sentence priming (e.g., Bock, 1986b; Pickering & Branigan, 1998). Seventy-two filler sentences were also created, consisting of a variety of sentence structures. Datives and fillers were also paired into meaning-unrelated pairs. Two factors of interest were manipulated, each with two levels, counterbalanced across speakers and items: prime-sentence type (primes were either sentence-complement structures or transitive structures) and whether the prime included a that. For control purposes, whether the encoded target sentence included a that was counterbalanced across speakers, items, and the factors of interest. Sixteen presentation lists were created. The form of a given sentence on each list was determined by rotating it (in counterbalanced fashion across sentence pairs) through (a) whether it was a prime or target sentence 383 (with its pairmate serving the other role), (b) whether the target in its pair did or did not have a that, (c) whether the prime in its pair was a sentence complement or a transitive, and (d) whether the prime in its pair did or did not have a that. Note that the unit of analysis for the items analyses was the item pair. Thus, for the 24 critical item pairs on each list, speakers saw six pairs in each priming condition (three with targets with thats and three with targets without); hence, the two prime-condition factors and the target that factor were manipulated within list, counterbalanced across item pair. Whether a particular sentence was prime or target was manipulated between lists. The dative and filler sentence pairs were added to each list, resulting in 72 prime–target pairs per list. Four speakers were tested on each list, so that across the experiment, each sentence pair appeared 16 times in each priming condition. The same fixed, randomly generated order of presentation was used for all lists, constrained so that no more than two critical or filler trials were presented consecutively. Scoring and analysis. As can occur with the (relatively) free responses that are elicited in language-production tasks, a notable number of trials were excluded because prime and target productions were not analyzable (a problem magnified here by the fact that speakers produced two utterances per observation, both of which had to satisfy certain criteria). Produced primes were coded as one of the two kinds of prime types (sentence-complement structures, where the main verb was followed by an embedded clause that could optionally be preceded by a that, or a transitive structure, where the main verb was followed by a simple noun-phrase), with or without a that after the main verb (that or null-complementizer for the sentence-complements, a that or a the for the transitives). Any prime that was not produced as one of these structures was coded as other. Any trial where a speaker produced a prime sentence that was coded into a different prime category from what was originally presented was excluded from the main analysis. Target productions were also coded for whether they were produced as sentence complements, and any trials in which the target was not a sentence complement were excluded from the main analysis. Prime and target productions were coded as forgotten either if the speaker said ‘‘I forgot’’ or if the speaker produced only the prompt words. Performance on prime and target sentences is reported in Table 1, and the percentages of analyzed trials is reported in Fig. 2. Because of these exclusions, 20 speakers were left with missing values in at least one cell of their designs. Rather than estimate those missing values or eliminate those speakers, statistical analyses were conducted with list instead of speaker as a random factor, thereby combining the four speakers who saw the same list 384 V.S. Ferreira / Journal of Memory and Language 48 (2003) 379–398 Table 1 Scoring of produced primes and targets (when originally presented with versus without that) in Experiment 1 Prime type Primes SC That No that Transitive That No that Targets presented with that SC That No that SC Forgot No that 314 157 54 202 0 0 3 7 6 12 7 6 10 4 2 2 190 3 145 327 28 34 9 14 129 118 27 39 0 0 14 15 7 3 15 17 45 46 0 0 16 12 9 8 10 17 49 66 1 0 9 10 7 8 13 16 61 71 1 0 15 14 5 8 15 24 95 75 That Other That Transitive That 112 No that 109 Targets presented without that SC That 113 No that 92 Transitive That No that Transitive No that Note. ‘‘SC’’ stands for ‘‘sentence complement.’’ into a single ‘‘super-subject.’’ 3 Standard subject analyses were also conducted on the 44 speakers without missing values; unless noted otherwise, the significance or non-significance of the subject analysis was always the same as the list analysis. Also, one item was excluded from the items analyses because of a missing value. The proportions of sentence-complement targets produced with a that in each condition for each list (across items) and for each item (across lists) were calculated and entered into analyses of variance (ANOVAs) using list (F1) and item (F2) as random factors. That-mention was assessed with repeated-measures 2 2 2 ANOVAs, with prime-type and whether the prime and the target included a that as factors. Priming effects are evaluated separately for sentence complement and transitive primes with planned comparisons. Variability is reported with 95% confidence-interval halfwidths based on single degree-of-freedom compari- 3 Note that this means that the reported means and confidence intervals can be generalized to new lists rather than to new speakers. However, given that the speaker means and confidence intervals can only be based on about two-thirds of the tested participants, it is unclear that they would provide a more representative measure of performance. sons. All significant effects achieved the .05 level or better. Reported means were calculated across list means. Results Overall performance. The numbers of prime and target sentences in each experimental condition that were produced as the relevant sentence types are reported in Table 1. Speakers mostly produced primes with the same structure as was originally presented. When they did not, they produced sentence-complement primes without a that 54 times (14%) when originally presented with primes with one, whereas they produced sentence-complement primes with thats 157 times (41%) when originally presented with primes without one. This difference shows that in this experiment, speakers have a bias to mention thats overall. Transitive primes originally presented with determiner thats were produced as transitives with the determiner the instead 145 times (38%), showing that determiner thats were recalled relatively poorly, probably because they are stylistically marked and unusual in the context of an isolated sentence. Speakers produced more other structures with transitive primes (62 total, or 8%) than with sentence-complement primes (18 or 2.3%), because with transitive primes, the critical V.S. Ferreira / Journal of Memory and Language 48 (2003) 379–398 385 Fig. 2. Percentages of target utterances produced with a that as a function of prime sentence-type and prime that-mention in Experiment 1. Percentages of utterances scored in each condition are shown in parentheses. Error bars show 95% confidence interval halfwidths by list. immediate post-verbal determiner had to be accurately produced, and sometimes it was recalled as an a, his, and so forth. Target structures were most often produced as sentence-complement structures. Priming effects. Across all conditions, 857 trials (56%) satisfied the scoring criteria. For these scorable trials, the percentages of sentence-complement targets produced with thats in the different priming conditions are shown in Fig. 2. The results show that sentencecomplement primes (top panel) with thats (shaded bars) versus without (open bars) strongly affected target production, while transitive primes (bottom panel) were less effective. Speakers produced more thats in sentence complement targets after any kind of prime with a that ðF 1ð1; 15Þ ¼ 28:7; CI ¼ 7:5%; F 2ð1; 22Þ ¼ 12:2; CI ¼ 11:7%Þ, but this effect interacted (marginally by lists) with the structure of the priming sentence ðF 1ð1; 15Þ ¼ 3:8; p < :08; CI ¼ 12:1%; F 2ð1;22Þ ¼ 8:3; CI ¼ 11:6%Þ. With the sentence-complement primes, speakers produced about 27% more thats in sentence-complement targets after sentence-complement primes with thats compared to after sentence-complement primes without, a difference that was significant ðF 1ð1; 15Þ ¼ 22:2; F 2ð1; 22Þ ¼ 30:9Þ. With transitive primes, speakers produced about 11% more thats in sentence-complement targets after transitive primes with determiner thats compared to after transitive primes without, a difference that was marginally significant only by lists ðF 1ð1; 15Þ ¼ 3:8; p < :07; F 2ð1; 22Þ ¼ 2:2Þ. While speakers produced more thats in target sentences that were originally presented with thats ðF 1ð1; 15Þ ¼ 7:1; CI ¼ 10:6; F 2ð1; 22Þ ¼ 12:0; CI ¼ 8:1Þ, this did not interact with any other factor (all F s < 1). Datives also showed a standard priming effect: Speakers produced about 18% more double-object targets after double-object primes (53.4%) than after prepositional dative primes (34.9%; F 1ð1; 15Þ ¼ 34:5; CI ¼ 6:7%; F 2ð1; 11Þ ¼ 8:7; CI ¼ 11:3%). This difference is similar to that observed in other studies (e.g., Bock, 1986a, reported a 22% difference), suggesting that the recall-based methodology used here is capable of revealing the same kinds of priming effects as have been observed with other tasks. Table 2 shows target-production performance after inaccurate primes for all experiments. In all cases, the pattern was either similar to performance after accurately produced primes, or the numbers of observations are too small to interpret. Target performance after inaccurately produced primes is not discussed further. Discussion The results of Experiment 1 show that the mention of an optional that in a sentence-complement target was differentially sensitive to the mention of a that in the immediately preceding prime, such that a complementizer that in a sentence-complement prime was effective, but a determiner that in a transitive prime was less so. Hence, that-mention is indeed primable—if speakers produce a sentence with a that once, they are likely to produce a sentence with a that again. However, the weak 386 V.S. Ferreira / Journal of Memory and Language 48 (2003) 379–398 Table 2 Performance on target sentences after inaccurately produced primes in all experiments Prime type Experiment 1 Sentence complement That No that Transitives That No that Experiment 2 Sentence complement That No that Noun complement That No that Experiment 3 SC w/that SC w/o that Neutrals Target Performance That No that That% Others Forgotten Total 125 19 14 24 89.9 44.2 19 6 13 9 171 58 1 72 1 53 50.0 57.6 1 16 0 14 3 155 107 13 23 9 82.3 59.1 26 3 19 5 175 30 4 2 5 0 44.4 100.0 0 1 3 5 12 8 95 7 4 20 7 5 82.6 50.0 44.4 6 0 0 4 3 1 127 17 10 Note. ‘‘SC’’ refers to sentence-complement structures. priming effect observed with the determiner thats shows that production of the phonology of the that is unlikely to underlie the extent of such priming. However, the mention of thats in the sentence-complement targets after transitive primes with versus without determiner thats was in a direction consistent with a priming effect (with a marginally significant planned comparison by speakers). If indeed this difference reflects an influence of lexical repetition upon thatmention, it should be evident again in Experiment 2. primes include a that that is phonologically and lexically identical to the that in the sentence-complement targets (unlike the determiner thats in Experiment 1), but occurs in a different syntactic context (since the noun-complement complementizer is headed by a noun, while the sentence-complement complementizer is headed by a verb). Thus Experiment 2 assessed whether producing the word that once causes speakers to produce the word that again independent of syntactic structure (i.e., whether priming the ‘‘that’’ lemma and lexeme can cause function-word repetition). Experiment 2 Method Speakers again produced sentence-complement targets after one of the two kinds of primes: sentencecomplement primes as in Experiment 1, or noun-complement primes such as ‘‘The theory that penguins built the igloos was completely false’’ (which were compared to no-that controls like ‘‘The theory of the melting igloos was completely false’’; note that in American English, noun-complements without thats, like ‘‘The theory penguins built the igloos was completely false’’ are at best marginally grammatical4). Such noun-complement Speakers. Sixty-four new speakers from the same population as Experiment 1 were tested. Apparatus and procedure. The apparatus and procedure were the same as in Experiment 1. Materials, design, and analysis. The 48 sentencecomplement structures were paired into 24 new meaning-unrelated prime–target pairs as in Experiment 1, except that the assignment of a sentence to a prime or target role was fixed across all lists in Experiment 2. Twenty-four noun-complement primes (which included complementizer thats) and no-that controls were created based on materials in Bock and Cutting (1992). The noun-complement primes each included a clause-taking subject-noun argument; this was followed by a clausal argument (introduced with a complementizer that) or a prepositional phrase argu- 4 This is supported by the fact that though primes are sometimes recalled inaccurately (see below), only one nouncomplement was produced without a that across the entire experiment. V.S. Ferreira / Journal of Memory and Language 48 (2003) 379–398 ment (without any kind of that) to create that and no-that priming sentences respectively. Each nouncomplement sentence with its matched control was randomly assigned to a sentence-complement prime (with and without the that) to result in a set of four priming sentences. The design was as in Experiment 1, except the transitive primes were replaced with the noun-complement primes. Eight presentation lists were constructed by crossing the two prime factors and the target-structure factor. Dative sentences were not tested in Experiment 2. Twelve filler-sentence pairs were eliminated at random, and the remaining 24 pairs were added to each list. The 48 trials in each list were presented in a fixed, randomly generated order with the same sequential constraints as in Experiment 1. Sentence-complements were scored as in Experiment 1. Noun-complements were scored as accurately produced if they began with the correct subject noun and continued with a complementizer ‘‘that’’ or with a preposition in the ‘‘that’’ and ‘‘no that’’ conditions, respectively. Exclusions in Experiment 2 (reported in Table 3 and Fig. 3) left 16 subjects without an observation in at least one cell of the design, so the same list-based analyses were conducted as in Experiment 1. Four items were excluded from the items analyses because of 387 missing values. Analysis techniques and reporting conventions were as in Experiment 1. Results Overall performance. Table 3 reports the numbers of prime and target productions that were produced with the relevant types of syntactic structures as a function of priming condition. Primes were mostly produced with the same structure as originally presented, though speakers produced thats in sentencecomplement primes originally presented without one on 173 trials (45%), and they omitted thats from sentences originally presented with thats on 30 trials (7.8%). Targets were produced mostly as sentencecomplement structures. Priming effects. Overall, 836 trials (54.4%) satisfied the scoring criteria. For these scorable trials, the percentages of sentence complement targets produced with thats in the different priming conditions are shown in Fig. 3. Sentence-complement primes (top panel) were as effective as in Experiment 1, while noun-complement primes (bottom panel) were ineffective. Speakers produced more thats in target sentences when the prime also had a that (F 1ð1; 7Þ ¼ 18:5; CI ¼ 5:8%; F 2ð1; 19Þ ¼ 8:8; CI ¼ 6:6%; the main effect was marginally Table 3 Scoring of produced primes and targets (when originally presented with versus without that) in Experiment 2 Prime type Primes SC That No that NC That No that Targets presented with that SC That No that NC That No that Targets presented without that SC That No that NC That No that SC NC That Other Forgot That No that 336 173 30 189 0 0 0 0 12 16 6 6 2 0 1 0 355 12 8 351 13 14 5 7 120 101 13 28 0 0 0 0 35 35 24 33 105 108 17 26 0 0 0 0 41 22 29 36 99 84 39 54 0 0 0 0 32 36 22 18 79 98 40 33 0 0 0 0 38 32 35 29 Note. ‘‘SC’’ stands for ‘‘sentence complement,’’ ‘‘NC’’ for ‘‘noun complement.’’ No that 388 V.S. Ferreira / Journal of Memory and Language 48 (2003) 379–398 Fig. 3. Percentages of target utterances produced with a that as a function of prime sentence-type and prime that-mention in Experiment 2. Percentages of utterances scored in each condition are shown in parentheses. Error bars show 95% confidence interval halfwidths by list. significant in the standard subjects analysis, F ð1; 47Þ ¼ 3:7; p < :07), but importantly, this interacted with the type of prime sentence ðF 1ð1; 7Þ ¼ 25:9; CI ¼ 9:1%; F 2ð1; 19Þ ¼ 27:1; CI ¼ 9:3%Þ. With sentence-complement primes, speakers produced 24% more thats in sentence-complement targets after sentence complement primes with thats, compared to without, yielding a significant difference ðF 1ð1; 7Þ ¼ 40:0; F 2ð1; 19Þ ¼ 33:6Þ, whereas they produced 3% fewer thats after noun-complement primes with thats compared to after controls without, a difference that was not significant ðF 1ð1; 7Þ ¼ 0:77; F 2ð1; 19Þ ¼ 2:5Þ. Again, speakers produced more thats in target sentences when it originally included one ðF 1ð1; 7Þ ¼ 11:4; CI ¼ 11:9%; F 2ð1; 19Þ ¼ 14:7; CI ¼ 7:4%Þ, but this factor did not interact with any other factors (all ps > :1). Discussion Experiment 2 showed that sentence-complements primed effectively while noun-complements did not. These results thus show that producing the word that in a prime sentence does not cause speakers to produce the same word that again in a subsequent target sentence. Together with the small priming differences in Experiment 1 (a result corroborated by Experiment 2), this suggests that speakers have little or no tendency to repeat function words from one sentence to the next, implying that function-word repetition is unlikely to underlie the structural persistence effect. On the other hand, Experiments 1 and 2 revealed that that-mention was influenced when the preceding prime involved the production of the same kind of syntactic structure. This can straightforwardly be explained as syntactic repetition: when speakers produce the syntactic structure of a sentence-complement structure with a that—a full sentence-complement structure—they are likely to produce a full sentencecomplement structure again, but if they produce the syntactic structure of a sentence-complement without a that—a reduced sentence-complement structure—they are likely to produce a reduced sentence-complement structure again. One other aspect of the results from Experiment 2 is of potential interest. The baseline level of that-mention for the sentence-complement targets, as determined by the Garnsey et al. (1992) norms, is 75% (which is reassuringly close to the 76% and 79% levels of thatmention in the ineffective noun-complement priming conditions). When compared against this baseline, it appears that omitting a that in a sentence-complement prime decreases target that-mention more (about 16%) than mentioning a that increases it (about 8%). This suggests that a lexical item that speakers did not mention may have persisted more than a lexical item that speakers did mention; if so, this would strongly suggest that the structural persistence of full and reduced sentence-complements observed here cannot be due to the repetition of function words from one sentence to the next. V.S. Ferreira / Journal of Memory and Language 48 (2003) 379–398 Of course, it cannot be assumed that in this task, baseline that-mention is accurately measured by the offline norms of Garnsey et al. (1992) (or by the nouncomplement primes, since they were not designed to be contrasted with the sentence-complement primes). To provide a better estimate, in Experiment 3, the priming effect from full and reduced (e.g., ‘‘The company insured (that) the farm was covered for two million dollars’’) sentence-complement primes was compared to fully neutral primes—primes that started with the same subject argument, but that included a verb that does not take a clausal complement and thus did not involve the mention or omission of a that at all (e.g., ‘‘The company paid for the farm with two million dollars in cash’’). If the absence of the that primes more effectively than its presence, then Experiment 3 should reveal that compared to neutral primes, sentence-complement primes with thats should not cause speakers to produce more thats in sentence-complement targets, while sentence-complement primes without thats should cause speakers to produce fewer thats in sentence-complement targets. Experiment 3 was also designed to address two methodological concerns from Experiments 1 and 2. First, there was significant data loss, especially with primes that tested sentence-complements without thats. Second, because primes and targets were encoded and recalled on the same trial, factors unrelated to production but required for task performance (e.g., sentence-comprehension or memory factors) may have influenced prime–target interactions. To circumvent these problems, primes and targets in Experiment 3 were presented on separate consecutive trials, each paired with filler trials. On every trial, speakers encoded two sentences into memory, but were only prompted to produce one of those sentences. On prime trials, speakers were presented with a filler sentence and then the prime sentence, and then they were prompted to produce the prime. Thus, during prime production, the other sentence within the trial (here, a filler sentence) did not have to be maintained in memory as the prime was produced, potentially increasing speakersÕ prime accuracy. On the next (target) trial, speakers were presented with the target sentence and then a filler sentence, and then they were prompted to produce the target. Thus, because primes and targets are presented on separate trials, factors related to the comprehension of or memory for primes are unlikely to influence target production or vice versa. One effect of this different methodology is that primes and targets are now more distant from one another, both in time and in the amount of intervening material that is processed (i.e., the two filler trials that accompany primes and targets); thus Experiment 3 should also provide some indication about the long-term stability of the that-priming effect. 389 Experiment 3 Method Speakers. Speakers were 48 members from the same population as Experiment 1. Materials. The 48 sentence-complement structures from Experiment 1 were used. For each, a neutral priming sentence was created that had the same subject noun-phrase and a similar overall meaning, but included a main verb that could not take a clausal argument. For many of the neutral sentences, additional adverbs, adjectives, or adjunct phrases were used to make their length comparable to the sentence-complement primes. Sentence-complements were rotated through prime and target roles, as in Experiment 1. All 72 fillers from Experiment 1 were used in Experiment 3. Forty-eight of the fillers were paired with primes and targets for presentation on prime or target trials, and the remaining 24 were paired with one another for presentation on all-filler trials (which were individually interspersed with critical trials to disguise the prime– target sequences). Apparatus and procedure. Apparatus and procedure were the same as Experiments 1 and 2, except that primes and targets were now presented on consecutive trials. On prime trials, speakers were presented with a filler sentence and then the prime sentence, and were then prompted to produce the prime. On the immediately following trial, speakers were presented with the target sentence and then a filler, and were prompted to produce the target. On all-filler trials, speakers were presented with two consecutive fillers, and on half the trials were prompted to recall the first filler, and on the other half were prompted to recall the second filler. Details of presentation were the same as in Experiment 1, except that the trial ended after speakers attempted recall of only one sentence. Instructions and practice were the same as Experiment 1. Design and analysis. One factor was counterbalanced within speakers and items in Experiment 3: prime-type, which was full sentence-complement, reduced sentencecomplement, or neutral. Whether the target included a that was also manipulated in counterbalanced fashion. Twelve presentation lists were created in the same way as in Experiment 1. Each speaker saw eight trials in each priming condition. Prime–target sequences and all-filler trials were presented in a fixed randomly generated order. Sentence-complement prime and target productions were scored as in Experiment 1. Neutral-prime productions were scored as analyzable as long as they were not forgotten nor produced with a sentence-complement taking verb. Performance on prime and target trials is shown in Table 4, and the percentages of analyzable trials are shown in Fig. 4. To assess how the 390 V.S. Ferreira / Journal of Memory and Language 48 (2003) 379–398 Table 4 Scoring of produced primes and targets (when originally presented with versus without that) in Experiment 3 Prime type SC w/ that SC w/o that Other Forgot 361 127 0 17 249 0 4 6 384 2 2 0 Targets presented with that Full SC 161 Reduced SC 148 Neutral 151 20 32 19 3 6 10 8 6 12 Targets presented without that Full SC 110 Reduced SC 90 Neutral 95 65 85 69 6 6 10 11 11 18 Primes Full SC Reduced SC Neutral Note. ‘‘SC’’ stands for ‘‘sentence complement.’’ full and reduced sentence-complement primes influenced target production, each sentence-complement priming condition was compared to the neutral priming condition with planned comparisons. Analysis techniques and reporting conventions were as in Experiments 1 and 2. Results Overall performance. The numbers of prime and target sentences in each priming condition produced as the critical structure types are reported in Table 4. Full sentence-complement and neutral primes were produced highly accurately, while reduced sentence-complement primes were produced as full sentence-complements 127 times (33%). Targets were overwhelmingly produced as sentence-complement structures. Priming effects. Overall, 903 trials (78.4%) satisfied the scoring criteria. Fig. 4 shows the mean percentages of target sentence-complements produced with a that in each of the priming conditions on scorable trials. Sentence-complement primes with versus without a that yielded a priming effect comparable to those in Experiments 1 and 2, as speakers produced about 18% more Fig. 4. Percentages of target utterances produced with a that as a function of prime sentence-type in Experiment 3. Percentages of utterances scored in each condition are shown in parentheses. Error bars show 95% confidence interval halfwidths by list. V.S. Ferreira / Journal of Memory and Language 48 (2003) 379–398 thats in sentence-complement targets after sentencecomplement primes with thats, compared to after sentence-complement primes without. This difference led to a significant main effect of prime-type ðF 1ð2; 22Þ ¼ 11:6; CI ¼ 8:3%; F 2ð2; 46Þ ¼ 12:5; CI ¼ 7:3%Þ. Most importantly, the neutral primes patterned with the full sentence-complement primes: Speakers produced only 3.8% more thats in sentence-complement targets after sentence-complement primes with thats, compared to after neutral primes. This difference was not significant ðF 1ð1; 22Þ ¼ 0:88; F 2ð1; 46Þ ¼ 1:3Þ. On the other hand, speakers produced 14.5% fewer thats in sentence-complement targets after sentence-complement primes without thats compared to after neutral primes, a difference that was significant ðF 1ð1; 22Þ ¼ 13:2; F 2ð1; 46Þ ¼ 13:3Þ. Speakers produced more thats in target sentences originally presented with a that ðF 1ð1; 22Þ ¼ 141; CI ¼ 5:4%; F 2ð1; 23Þ ¼ 90:4; CI ¼ 6:7%Þ, but this factor did not interact with prime-type ðF 1ð1; 22Þ ¼ 1:7; CI ¼ 8:1%; F 2ð2; 46Þ ¼ 0:94; CI ¼ 11:4%Þ. Discussion Experiment 3 verified the surprising result from Experiments 1 and 2. After neutral primes, in which a speaker could neither mention nor omit a that, speakers produced thats in targets 73% of the time. This reveals speakersÕ bias to mention thats in targets more often than they omit them independent of any effect of priming. After full sentence-complement primes—sentencecomplement primes with thats—speakers produced targets with just 4% more thats above this baseline, whereas after reduced sentence-complement primes— sentence-complement primes without thats—speakers produced nearly 15% fewer thats below this baseline. The fact that compared to baseline, omitting a that in a sentence-complement prime exerted a stronger priming effect than producing one suggests that that-mention is not influenced by lexical factors per se, since production presumably cannot be affected by a lexical item that a speaker did not mention. Rather, these results suggest that that-mention is influenced by the syntactic processes that accompany the (non-) production of the complementizer that. This point is further addressed in the General discussion. Furthermore, even though the procedure was different from that used in Experiments 1 and 2, a sentence-complement priming effect was still observed in Experiment 3. This is important for three reasons. First, the critical reduced sentence-complement priming condition in Experiment 3 included notably more trials than the same conditions in Experiments 1 and 2, yet, a very similar priming effect was observed. Second, primes and targets were encoded and produced on separate trials in Experiment 3, so that the observed 391 priming effects could not have resulted from comprehension- or memory-based influences upon prime–target interactions (e.g., the priming effect cannot be due to an effect of target encoding on prime production). Finally, even though more time and material separated primes and targets in Experiment 3 than in Experiments 1 and 2, the priming effect (18%) was only a little smaller (28% and 25%). Thus, the that-priming effect does not decay quickly, but rather can survive over longer intervals. This converges with other evidence showing that structural persistence can be a very longlived effect (see Bock & Griffin, 2000, but see Branigan et al., 1999; Levelt & Kelter, 1982, for evidence that persistence effects sometimes decay rapidly). It was still the case, however, that the reduced sentence-complement priming condition included fewer analyzable trials than the other two priming conditions. To ensure that some factor associated with the difference in data loss between the sentence-complement priming conditions was not responsible for the that-priming effect, whether such differences in data loss are related to the size of the priming effect was explored on a speakerby-speaker basis (across all experiments). If the priming effect comes from relative differences in lost observations such that relatively fewer observations in the reduced sentence-complement condition causes a greater priming effect, then speakers who had many more observations in the full than in the reduced sentence-complement condition should also have showed the biggest full versus reduced sentence-complement priming effects. However, if anything, the opposite is observed: priming effects are smaller for speakers whose full sentencecomplement condition had many more observations than their reduced sentence-complement condition. Indeed, this makes sense: speakers who lost most observations in the reduced sentence-complement condition are ‘‘that-producers’’ generally, so that even if immediate memory causes them to omit a that on just one or two prime trials, they are still very likely to mention a that in the subsequent target (when short-term memory is less influential), which would work against any priming effect. General discussion The results of these experiments showed that when speakers produced full or reduced sentence-complement structures once, they were likely to produce full or reduced sentence-complement structures again. This generalizes the well-known structural persistence effect to a new sentence type, namely the sentence-complement structure. (This further implies that full and reduced sentence-complement structures should be treated as separate in the same way as, say, actives and passives.) Importantly, the experiments show that this effect is 392 V.S. Ferreira / Journal of Memory and Language 48 (2003) 379–398 unlikely to be due to lexical repetition, as producing phonologically similar (Experiment 1Õs demonstrative determiners) or lexically identical (Experiment 2Õs nouncomplement complementizers) thats in syntactically distinct prime sentences did not lead to the increased production of thats in subsequent sentence-complement target sentences. This suggests that structural persistence reflects the operation of lexically independent syntactic processes. Finally, Experiment 3 showed that even though sentence-complement primes with versus without thats caused significant priming, sentence-complement primes with thats did not exert a greater priming influence than neutral primes, suggesting that the priming effect comes from not producing a that rather than from producing one. Why was the asymmetry in the persistence of full versus reduced sentence-complement structures observed? One possibility is that it is related to the bias to produce full sentence-complement structures in the first place. That is, one explanation of structural persistence generally (Chang, Dell, Bock, & Griffin, 2000) is that it is due to small modifications of the cognitive procedures that map messages (e.g., the intent to express some idea that includes a subordinated proposition) onto syntactic structures that can express those messages (e.g., full or reduced sentence-complement structures). Anytime a particular structure is chosen, the cognitive procedures that are responsible are modified so that that particular mapping is more likely in the future (possibly as a reflection of the learning of that message-to-structure mapping more generally). Importantly, the easier a particular mapping is to choose, the less that the responsible cognitive procedure need be modified, since easy selection implies that the chosen mapping is already well in place (i.e., the modification can be seen as error-based, so that the degree of modification is proportional to the degree of error involved in selecting that mapping). Thus, if a particular mapping is biased, so that one structural alternative (e.g., the full sentence-complement structure) is easier than another (e.g., the reduced sentencecomplement structure), then the degree of priming should also be biased accordingly (less priming for the full than the reduced sentence-complement-structure mapping). Some tentative support for this possibility comes from exploring the full sentence-complement bias in a verb-by-verb manner. That is, some verbs (e.g., reported) are strongly biased toward being produced with full sentence-complement structures (according to the Garnsey et al., 1992 norms), whereas others (e.g., knew) are less so. If the priming asymmetry is related to the full sentence-complement bias, then more strongly biased verbs should show a smaller priming effect than more weakly biased verbs. This was explored by taking all scored target productions from Experiments 1 and 3 (Experiment 2 used only half of the verbs in target sentences), calculating the priming effect from full versus reduced sentence complements separately for each verb, and correlating the difference between these with the degree of preference for that verb to be produced with a full sentence-complement structure (according to the Garnsey et al., 1992 norms).5 With all 48 verbs, the correlation is in the predicted direction but is non-significant (r ¼ ).1). One verb (knew) is a notable outlier in this analysis; however, if it is excluded, the correlation becomes marginally significant ðr ¼ :28; p < :06Þ. Thus, priming may be related to degree of bias. If so, this would provide support for the error-based explanation of structure persistence (Chang et al., 2000). However, given these analysesÕ post-hoc and fragile nature, further research is necessary to verify this point. An alternative explanation of the asymmetry is that full- and reduced-sentence-complement primes may exert an equal and symmetric effect, but that an additional factor depressed that-mention after both kinds of primes. One such possibility is that producing any sentence-complement prime—full or reduced—makes producing the complement part of the sentence-complement target easier (note that in all experiments, sentence-complement targets generally were somewhat more likely after sentence-complement primes than after other kinds of primes). If so, this may depress thatmention in target sentence-complements overall (see Ferreira & Dell, 2000 for evidence), bringing thatmention after full-sentence-complement primes down closer to baseline, and pushing that-mention after reduced sentence-complement primes even further from baseline.6 Of course, these explanations assume that the structural persistence observed here reflects syntactic repetition, rather than the repetition of some conceptual correlate of the distinction between full and reduced sentence-complements. The latter seems unlikely, however. While the complementizer that may communicate information about speakersÕ degree of analytic mental activity, or their commitment to, endorsement of, or distance between parts of the sentence content (Thompson & Mulac, 1991; Underhill, 1988; Yaguchi, 2001), generally, the conceptual underpinning of the optional that in the sentence-complement structure is unclear. Furthermore, whatever conceptual content is carried by the that in sentence-complement structures seems also to be carried by the that in the noun-complement structures tested in Experiment 2 (or even the determiner thats tested in Experiment 1; Yaguchi, 5 I thank an anonymous reviewer for suggesting this analysis. 6 I thank Martin Pickering for pointing out this alternative. V.S. Ferreira / Journal of Memory and Language 48 (2003) 379–398 2001), yet the latter proved to be ineffective. On the other hand, the syntactic constitution of the complementizer that is well established in terms of its role in the syntactic structures of sentences and its participation in certain patterns of grammatical judgments (e.g., Doherty, 1993; Stowell, 1981). Indeed, evidence that an element as semantically unspecified yet syntactically relevant as the complementizer that exhibits robust structural persistence effects could be taken to support the claim that structural persistence generally comes from syntactic representations and not conceptual ones. That said, lexical accessibility does affect sentence production. If the form of a sentence is not determined by lexical factors, how are syntactic structures used that allow highly accessible words to be mentioned earlier and less accessible words later? One possibility is that lexical accessibility may not affect production directly through the selection of highly accessible lexical items, but rather through the influence of those highly accessible lexical items upon the selection of syntactic representations (Ferreira, 1996; Ferreira & Dell, 2000; Pickering & Branigan, 1998). That is, highly accessible lexical representations may influence production by promoting the selection of a syntactic structure that allows for the early mention of those highly accessible lexical items. Ferreira and Dell (2000) termed this lexical–syntactic interactionism (see Bock, 1982, for a cognitively motivated account of the same general idea). This raises a puzzle, however. If lexical accessibility can influence the selection of syntactic structures, then why in the present experiments did a highly accessible that—one that had just been produced in the previous sentence (even in a distinct structure)—fail to influence the selection of a syntactic structure for a full or reduced sentence-complement? Here, the distinction between function and content words is likely to be relevant. Interestingly, nearly all reported lexical accessibility effects have revealed an influence of the accessibility of content words, not of function words (with the exception of the Levelt & Kelter, 1982 result, discussed more below). Indeed, function words may be unable to support lexical accessibility effects, either because they are short and high frequency and are thus highly accessible under any circumstance (e.g., Dell, 1990), or because they are accessed in an informationally (Dell & Gordon, 2001) or architecturally different manner (Garrett, 1975, 1982) from content words such that the vagaries of memory retrieval that cause lexical accessibility effects are circumvented. Regardless of the processing reason, this would explain the lack of effect of lexical accessibility in the present experiments: a that produced in a previous sentence is unable to influence the production of a that in a current sentence because as a function word, it is not able to support lexical accessibility effects. It is worth noting that Ferreira and Dell (2000) and Ferreira and 393 Firato (in press) showed that the mention of an optional that in a sentence-complement structure is influenced by manipulations of lexical accessibility of the (contentword) material that follows the that. Together with the present evidence, this suggests that that-mention is influenced by the lexical accessibility not of the functionword that itself, but of the content-word material that follows the that. Levelt and Kelter (1982) did show that speakers were more likely to produce a particular preposition when an eliciting question also had that preposition. This effect might be explained, however, by claiming that function-word repetition can be supported by syntactic repetition—speakers heard the preposition in a prepositional phrase, and repeated that preposition in another prepositional phrase. Perhaps when structural persistence occurs, it makes a lexical persistence effect more likely. In fact, the results of the present experiment could be interpreted in this way: the persistence of full versus reduced sentence-complement syntactic structures may have led to the repetition of the word that from sentence to sentence.7 Importantly from a theoretical perspective, however, is that even with this explanation, it is syntactic repetition that leads to lexical repetition rather than the other way around, arguing against the idea that lexical repetition causes structural persistence. Overall, these experiments reveal that the mention of just a single word—the optional complementizer that—is syntactic in nature and not lexical. This highlights the autonomy of syntactic processes: Speakers know the words in their language, and independently, they know how to use those words in sentences. Together, the combination of these provides a basis for the creativity of language. Acknowledgments Portions of this work were presented at AMLaP Õ99 and at the 14th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing. I thank Kay Bock, Gary Dell, Fernanda Ferreira, Zenzi Griffin, Martin Pickering, the members of the language production group at UCSD, and three anonymous reviewers for helpful comments, and Carla Firato, Janet Lee, Melanie Hudson, and Hiromi Yoshita for assistance collecting data. This research was supported by National Institute of Health grant R01 MH64733. 7 This shows that the present data do not mediate between theories of sentence-production that argue that function words are selected as parts of syntactic structures (e.g., Garrett, 1975, 1982) or are selected directly from the lexicon (e.g., Levelt, 1989). 394 V.S. Ferreira / Journal of Memory and Language 48 (2003) 379–398 Appendix A. Experimental materials Immediately below are all sentence-complement materials, the transitives from Experiment 1, and the neutrals from Experiment 3. ‘‘SC’’ denotes sentence complement. For sentence-complements, no-that conditions were gener- Number Structure Sentence 1A 1A 1A 1B 1B 1B 2A 2A 2A 2B 2B 2B 3A 3A 3A 3B 3B 3B 4A 4A 4A 4B 4B 4B 5A 5A 5A 5B 5B 5B 6A 6A 6A 6B 6B 6B 7A 7A 7A 7B 7B 7B 8A 8A 8A 8B 8B 8B 9A 9A 9A 9B SC Transitive Neutral SC Transitive Neutral SC Transitive Neutral SC Transitive Neutral SC Transitive Neutral SC Transitive Neutral SC Transitive Neutral SC Transitive Neutral SC Transitive Neutral SC Transitive Neutral SC Transitive Neutral SC Transitive Neutral SC Transitive Neutral SC Transitive Neutral SC Transitive Neutral SC Transitive Neutral SC Transitive Neutral SC The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The ated by deleting the complementizer that after the verb. For transitives, no-that conditions were generated by replacing the determiner that with a the. A and B items formed prime–target pairs (e.g., each 1A sentence served as primes for the 1B sentence-complement structure and vice versa). director announced that HollywoodÕs hottest actor would be playing the part director announced that casting decision last week director enticed HollywoodÕs hottest actor to play the part teacher noticed that the failing student skipped class teacher noticed that student because he kept skipping class teacher scowled at the failing student at the back of class applicant surmised that the company had already hired someone applicant surmised that decision by the hiring committee applicant contacted the company before they hired someone paramedic explained that the old woman had fainted paramedic explained that possibility before moving the injured woman paramedic arrived before the old woman fainted accountant estimated that the wealthy widow would pay a lot of taxes accountant estimated that profit after looking at the sales figures accountant consulted with the wealthy widow about her hefty taxes contest official pronounced that the original winner had been disqualified contest official pronounced that winner on Tuesday contest official yawned when the winner was disqualified gambler guessed that the lucky newcomer had bluffed on the previous hand gambler guessed that winning horse before the race gambler exploded after the lucky newcomer bluffed on the previous hand plumber confessed that some customers had been overcharged plumber confessed that fraudulent behavior when he got caught plumber swindled some customers by overcharging them chiropractor observed that the suffering patient could not stand up straight chiropractor observed that painful damage to the personÕs back muscles chiropractor hesitated when the suffering patient did not stand up straight jury believed that the young witness told the truth jury believed that witness after her honest testimony jury nodded together when the young woman told the truth flashing light indicated that the car was nearly out of gas flashing light indicated that location where the space shuttle disappeared flashing light pulsed when the car ran out of gas doctor suggested that the worried mother consult a specialist doctor suggested that medication in high dosage doctor coerced the worried mother to see a specialist librarian noted that the frequent visitor had an overdue book librarian noted that book because of the extensive damage librarian named the frequent visitor with the overdue book mayor declared that the brave firefighter acted heroically mayor declared that extra income on his income tax reports mayor praised the brave firefighter for acting heroically boss remembered that most of his staff had a vacation coming boss remembered that job applicant from the first time she applied boss gave most of his staff a surprise vacation security guard demanded that the known shoplifter leave the store immediately security guard demanded that weapon from the subdued criminal security guard encouraged the known shoplifter to leave the store immediately inspector doubted that the landlord repaired the fire escape properly inspector doubted that report about the broken elevator inspector admonished the landlord because of the faulty fire escape massage therapist felt that the client was too tense V.S. Ferreira / Journal of Memory and Language 48 (2003) 379–398 Appendix A. (continued) Number Structure Sentence 9B 9B 10A 10A 10A 10B 10B 10B 11A 11A 11A 11B 11B 11B 12A 12A 12A 12B 12B 12B 13A 13A 13A 13B 13B 13B 14A 14A 14A 14B 14B 14B 15A 15A 15A 15B 15B 15B 16A 16A 16A 16B 16B 16B 17A 17A 17A 17B 17B 17B 18A 18A 18A 18B 18B 18B 19A 19A Transitive Neutral SC Transitive Neutral SC Transitive Neutral SC Transitive Neutral SC Transitive Neutral SC Transitive Neutral SC Transitive Neutral SC Transitive Neutral SC Transitive Neutral SC Transitive Neutral SC Transitive Neutral SC Transitive Neutral SC Transitive Neutral SC Transitive Neutral SC Transitive Neutral SC Transitive Neutral SC Transitive Neutral SC Transitive Neutral SC Transitive Neutral SC Transitive The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The massage therapist felt that muscle which the customer complained about massage therapist sat beside the client until he became less tense dentist asserted that people need to floss more often dentist asserted that privilege before he testified in court dentist educated people about the benefits of flossing more often salesman guaranteed that his customers would be completely satisfied salesman guaranteed that workmanship for the life of the car salesman worked to his customerÕs complete satisfaction secretary recalled that the annoying client had been there before secretary recalled that annoying client from his previous visit secretary despised the annoying client who had been there before ticket agent feared that the flight would be cancelled ticket agent feared that new state law because it hurt her business ticket agent cursed when the flight got cancelled catcher protested that the base runner should have been called out catcher protested that call until he was thrown out of the game catcher punched the base runner before he was called out pirate suspected that the stow-away had hidden the treasure pirate suspected that stow-away as soon as he was discovered pirate looked behind the stow-away for the hidden treasure hobbyist maintained that the antique cars were one of a kind hobbyist maintained that old car in perfect working order hobbyist prospered because of his one-of-a-kind antique cars wedding planner proposed that the brideÕs family visit the chapel wedding planner proposed that pattern for the table cloths at the reception wedding planner met with the brideÕs family at the chapel receptionist denied that the pushy patient had an appointment receptionist denied that accusation about her stealing from petty cash receptionist persuaded the pushy patient to wait for his appointment landlord discovered that the dishonest tenant had a cat landlord discovered that damage after moving the fridge landlord reacted when the dishonest tenant lied about the cat travel agent confirmed that the honeymooning couple had a hotel reservation travel agent confirmed that flight for tomorrow travel agent informed the honeymooning couple of their hotel reservation coach knew that his starting quarterback missed practice coach knew that player because of his loud mouth coach blew up when his starting quarterback missed practice attorney argued that his defendant had done nothing wrong attorney argued that insanity defense perfectly every time attorney instructed his defendant to say nothing at all handwriting analysis revealed that the mafia boss had signed the contract handwriting analysis revealed that forged signature to the police handwriting analysis arrived after the mafia boss signed the contract company insured that the farm was covered for two million dollars company insured that farm for two million dollars company paid for the farm with two million dollars in cash mechanic mentioned that the antique car could use a tune-up mechanic mentioned that price estimate before fixing the car mechanic worked under the antique car to give it a tune-up professor realized that only some students studied the material professor realized that dream by publishing a book professor pushed only some students to study the material surgeon promised that the injured goalie would heal soon surgeon promised that procedure for the sickest patient surgeon treated the injured goalie to make him heal soon psychic predicted that the desperate woman would win the state lottery psychic predicted that set of winning numbers in the state lottery 395 396 V.S. Ferreira / Journal of Memory and Language 48 (2003) 379–398 Appendix A. (continued) Number Structure Sentence 19A 19B 19B 19B 20A 20A 20A 20B 20B 20B 21A 21A 21A 21B 21B 21B 22A 22A 22A 22B 22B 22B 23A 23A 23A 23B 23B 23B 24A 24A 24A 24B 24B 24B Neutral SC Transitive Neutral SC Transitive Neutral SC Transitive Neutral SC Transitive Neutral SC Transitive Neutral SC Transitive Neutral SC Transitive Neutral SC Transitive Neutral SC Transitive Neutral SC Transitive Neutral SC Transitive Neutral The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The psychic exploited the desperate woman with the gambling problem investigator learned that the suspect was at the scene of the crime investigator learned that new technique for interrogating criminals investigator harassed the suspect at the scene of the crime X-ray proved that the hurt child had broken a bone X-ray proved that doctorÕs theory beyond a reasonable doubt X-ray given to the hurt child revealed a broken bone police officer warned that the aggressive driver would get a ticket police officer warned that woman before she entered the line of fire police officer rewarded the aggressive driver with a ticket dog sensed that his owner might be in danger dog sensed that danger before he started growling dog growled when his owner was in danger article emphasized that the rookie fisherman caught the biggest fish article emphasized that strong public support for the scandalized politician article challenged the rookie fishermanÕs claim about the big fish taxi driver anticipated that the tourist would turn left taxi driver anticipated that robbery attempt before it happened taxi driver veered near the tourist when he turned left reporter heard that the rich tycoon made a large donation reporter heard that story from a White House source reporter profiled the rich tycoon after he made a large donation power company acknowledged that the power outage was caused by sabotage power company acknowledged that big problem after the sabotage power company prevented the power outage despite the sabotage prosecutor concluded that the detectives should gather more evidence prosecutor concluded that case with a strong closing argument prosecutor instructed the detectives to gather more evidence broker advised that low risk investors sell their stock broker advised that investor before realizing he was a crook broker escaped before the low risk investors could sell their stock newspaper reported that three elderly couples had been robbed newspaper reported that news item on the front page newspaper called three elderly couples about the robbery Immediately below are the noun-complement primes from Experiment 2. ‘‘Co-prime’’ and ‘‘target’’ indicate the sentencecomplement (from above) prime and targets that were paired Co-prime Target Comp Sentence 20A 20A 16B 16B 3B 3B 4A 4A 3A 3A 14B 14B 10B 10B 8B 8B 8A 8A 1A 1A 15A 15A 11A 11A 7A 7A 19A 19A 9B 9B 19B 19B That No-that That No-that That No-that That No-that That No-that That No-that That No-that That No-that The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The with that noun-complement structure (e.g., ‘‘The assumption that. . .’’ and ‘‘The X-ray proved that. . .’’ [20A] served as primes for ‘‘The boss remembered that. . .’’ [8A]). assumption that the rain caused the problem was unlikely to be true assumption in the philosophy problem was unlikely to be true belief that aliens invaded the planet drove Fox Mulder crazy belief about the unusual planet drove Fox Mulder crazy claim that wolves had raised the baby was reported in the news claim about the newborn baby was reported in the news concept that a comet concealed the satellite was considered original concept behind the secret satellite was considered original conclusion that the runner lost the race required a photo-finish conclusion of the exciting race required a photo-finish custom that they film the reunion was forgotten custom at the family reunion was forgotten dream that the prince inherited the castle surprised the princess dream about the mystifying castle surprised the princess fact that Gwynn caught the ball seemed hard to believe fact about the home-run ball seemed hard to believe V.S. Ferreira / Journal of Memory and Language 48 (2003) 379–398 397 Appendix A. (continued) Co-prime Target Comp Sentence 13A 13A 18A 18A 21A 21A 11B 11B 5B 5B 15B 15B 13B 13B 24B 24B 22A 22A 1B 1B 22B 22B 14A 14A 5A 5A 17A 17A 23A 23A 12A 12A 2B 2B 16A 16A 20B 20B 9A 9A 6A 6A 2A 2A 18B 18B 4B 4B 12B 12B 7B 7B 6B 6B 17B 17B 23B 23B 21B 21B 10A 10A 24A 24A That No-that That No-that That No-that That No-that That No-that That No-that That No-that That No-that That No-that That No-that That No-that That No-that That No-that That No-that That No-that That No-that The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The The fallacy that the earth is flat is sometimes believed by children fallacy of the earth being flat is sometimes believed by children fantasy that they might buy a new house kept the couple awake at night fantasy of the ancient haunted house kept the couple awake at night fear that the prisoners hid the weapons kept the police from attacking fear of the stolen powerful weapons kept the police from attacking hope that the coast guard might find the victims was easy to understand hope of the wet and hungry victims was easy to understand idea that the patient sue the doctor pleased the lawyer idea of the wise and wealthy doctor pleased the lawyer illusion that the explorer sighted the island got the crewÕs hopes up illusion of the exotic tropical island got the crewÕs hopes up message that they expelled the student surprised the parents message from the excited student surprised the parents opinion that he should find a donor was ignored opinion of the mysterious donor was ignored proposal that they buy the equipment was impressive proposal for the expensive equipment was impressive regulation that police examine the trucks angered the drivers regulation about the delivery trucks angered the drivers report that they started the fires was fabricated report of the destructive fires was fabricated statement that the intern framed the president was made in error statement about the unpopular president was made in error suspicion that they killed the terrorist was reported in the newspaper suspicion of the foreign terrorist was reported in the newspaper theory that penguins built the igloos was completely false theory about the melted igloos was completely false thought that they forgot the bill disturbed the woman thought of the late power bill disturbed the woman view that the river created the canyon was unbelievable view of the deep enormous canyon was unbelievable References Bencini, G., Bock, K., & Goldberg, A. 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