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Salience Effects: L2 Sentence Production as a Window on L1 Speech Planning

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Abstract

Salience influences grammatical structure during production in a language-dependent manner because different languages afford different options to satisfy preferences. During production, speakers may always try to satisfy all syntactic encoding preferences (e.g., salient entities to be mentioned early, themes to be assigned the syntactic function of object) and adjust when this is not possible (e.g., a salient theme in English) or, alternatively, they may learn early on to associate particular conceptual configurations with particular syntactic frames (e.g., salient themes with passives). To see which of these alternatives is responsible for the production of passives when dealing with a salient theme, we looked at the second language effects of salience for English-speaking learners of Spanish, where the two preferences can be satisfied simultaneously by fronting the object (Prat-Sala and Branigan in J Mem Lang 42:168–182, 2000). In accordance with highly incremental models of language production, English speakers appear to quickly make use of the alternatives in the second language that allow observance of more processing preferences.

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Notes

  1. The term ‘theme’ is used here as a sort of catch-all for roles that are usually associated with the syntactic function of direct object such as patient, recipient, and theme.

  2. The experimental pictures were the same black and white line drawings used by Prat-Sala and Branigan (2000).

  3. The filler pictures were drawn by the first author in the same style as the experimental ones.

  4. For comparability purposes, English and Spanish percentages in Fig. 2 are calculated with respect to the total number of cases instead of with respect to all passive/active responses, as in Prat-Sala and Branigan’s (2000, Table 1.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Merce Prat-Sala and Holly Branigan for making their materials available to us for use in this experiment.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Linguistics, BCSS, University of New England, Armidale, NSW, 2351, Australia

    Inés Antón-Méndez

  2. Department of World Languages and Cultures, American University, Washington, DC, USA

    Chip Gerfen

  3. Department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese, The Pennsylvania State University, State College, PA, USA

    Miguel Ramos

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  1. Inés Antón-Méndez
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  2. Chip Gerfen
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Correspondence to Inés Antón-Méndez.

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Antón-Méndez, I., Gerfen, C. & Ramos, M. Salience Effects: L2 Sentence Production as a Window on L1 Speech Planning. J Psycholinguist Res 45, 537–552 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-015-9361-7

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