Effects of lexical cues on phrase structure encoding: evidence from the production of genitives in Dutch

This paper examined the role of lexical processing in phrase structure building in sentence production. We asked whether speakers exploit a lexical cue as a lexical guide (i.e. the cued word occurs earlier in the sentence) and as a retrieval cue (i.e. a cue facilitates the retrieval of a memorised structure). In two experiments, participants recalled Dutch genitive sentences. In some recall trials, they received a lexical cue that repeated one argument of the to-be-recalled sentence. In two further experiments, participants read a genitive sentence and then generated a new one from a visually-presented triplet of arguments. The visual salience of the arguments and lexical overlap were manipulated. In all four experiments, speakers consistently started the phrase with the cued word. There was no evidence of a lexical cueing effect on structure retrieval. The findings suggest that speakers mainly exploit lexical information as a lexical guide when formulating phrase structures.