Elsevier

Cognition

Volume 98, Issue 2, December 2005, Pages 105-135
Cognition

Conceptual accessibility and sentence production in a free word order language (Odawa)

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2004.10.006Get rights and content

Abstract

The study reported here was conducted in the Algonquian language of Odawa (a.k.a. Ottawa), with the goal of gaining new insight into the ways that conceptual accessibility affects human sentence production. The linguistic characteristics of Odawa are quite different from those found in the languages most often examined by psycholinguists. The data obtained from the sentence production experiment reported here are thus relevant to production in a heretofore unexamined language. Moreover, the data inform broader theoretical issues, such as the extent to which sentence production can be considered as an incremental process, and the interaction of the various factors affecting conceptual accessibility. In addition, the study stands as evidence that experimental psycholinguistic research can and should be carried out in typologically diverse languages.

Introduction

In any human language, speakers have at their disposal a number of linguistic means by which they can highlight the importance of certain information relative to other information in the message. A central issue in the study of language production is how the ease with which the component concepts of a message can be accessed affects the linguistic form of the message. Bock (1986a) proposed the conceptual accessibility hypothesis to explain results from an extensive series of sentence production experiments that explored the interaction of conceptual prominence and linguistic form (Bock, 1986b, Bock, 1987, Bock and Irwin, 1980, Bock and Warren, 1985). According to the hypothesis, the process of assigning grammatical functions (e.g. subject, direct object) to words in a sentence is determined at least in part by the relative ease with which lexical entries for various concepts included in the intended message can be accessed. More specifically, the lemma (representations for words which encode their semantic and syntactic features) associated with the most accessible concept will be assigned the highest grammatical function, or, in standard syntactic theory, the grammatical function associated with the left-most available node in a syntactic tree structure. Thus, in a language with canonical subject-before-object word order (SVO, SOV, or VSO), subject status is assigned first, direct object next, indirect object next, oblique object next, and so on.

Section snippets

Conceptual accessibility

Work by Bock, 1986a, Bock, 1986b, Bock and Warren, 1985, Carroll, 1958, and others has shown that in English, when a noun phrase (NP) is made accessible by showing someone a picture of a semantically related item, asking a focusing question, or establishing a context, speakers tend to begin their sentences with that same introduced NP. Bock and Warren's (1985) work on the production of passives in English led to the conclusion that the most accessible entity claims not only an early position in

Odawa syntax

A general description of the syntax and morphology of Odawa is beyond the scope of this article; however, number of features of the language must be grasped if one is to make theoretical sense of the empirical data obtained here. Of primary concern in this context are the following characteristics of the language: the word order, the verbal system (direct, inverse, passive), the discourse information encoded in the nominal (and verbal) morphology, and the pro-drop of arguments. We briefly

Participants

Twenty-one native speakers of Odawa (sixteen women and five men) took part in the experiment. All participants were between the ages of 35 and 75; five were over the age of 65. Odawa is an endangered language, and the remaining population of speakers is generally elderly and rather small (approximately 1000 in the reserve in which the present experiment was run). Participants lived in or adjacent to the First Nations Reserve of Wikwemikong, Manitoulin Island, Ontario, and all described

General discussion

Because Odawa is different in several respects from the languages with which psycholinguists typically work, it was hoped that an Odawa production experiment might provide insight into certain central issues in sentence production research. Specifically, we sought to examine the extent and manner in which the conceptual accessibility of NPs would affect the linguistic form of picture descriptions. We hypothesized that the linguistic characteristics of Odawa would serve to tease apart factors

Summary

The experiment reported here was to our knowledge the first psycholinguistic experiment conducted in ‘the field’ in an indigenous North American language. One goal of this research, then, was to demonstrate the feasibility of conducting this sort of research in similar conditions and languages. Moreover, we feel that the results obtained demonstrate the importance of expanding psycholinguistic research into typologically diverse languages. The data obtained here support the notion that doing so

Acknowledgements

This research was supported in part by a Fulbright Fellowship to Kiel Christianson and an NSF dissertation improvement grant (BCS-0080659) to Fernanda Ferreira and Kiel Christianson. Without the cooperation and support of the people of Wikwemikong, Ontario, the Wikwemikong Band Council, former Chief Gladys Wakegijig, Genevieve Peltier, and Helen Roy, this research could not have been carried out. Kchi-miigwech! Portions of this research were reported at the 2001 CUNY Conference on Human

References (63)

  • J. Aissen

    Markedness and subject choice in optimality theory

    Natural Language and Linguistic Theory

    (1999)
  • R. Artstein

    Person animacy and null subjects

    Proceedings of console VII

    (1999)
  • A. Bailin et al.

    The assignment of thematic roles in Ojibwa

    Linguistics

    (1991)
  • J.K. Bock

    Exploring levels of processing in sentence production

  • J.K. Bock

    Meaning, sound, and syntax: Lexical priming in sentence production

    Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition

    (1986)
  • J.K. Bock

    An effect of the accessibility of word forms on sentence structures

    Journal of Memory and Language

    (1987)
  • J.K. Bock et al.

    Syntactic effects of information availability in sentence formulation

    Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior

    (1980)
  • J.K. Bock et al.

    Language production: Grammatical encoding

  • J.K. Bock et al.

    Conceptual accessibility and syntactic structure in sentence formulation

    Cognition

    (1985)
  • L. Bloomfield

    Eastern ojibwa: Grammatical sketch, texts, and word list

    (1956)
  • P. Branigan et al.

    Altruism, A-bar movement, and object agreement in Innu-aimûn

    Linguistic Inquiry

    (2002)
  • J. Brittain

    The morphosyntax of the Algonquian conjunct verb

    (2001)
  • Bruening, B. (2001). Syntax at the edge: Cross-clausal phenomena and the syntax of passamaquoddy. PhD dissertation,...
  • B. Bruening et al.

    Configurationality and object shift in Algonquian

    University of British Columbia working papers in linsguistics: Proceedings of the fifth workshop on structure and constituency in the languages of the Americas. Vancouver

    (2001)
  • J.B. Carroll

    Communication theory, linguistics, and psycholinguistics

    Review of Educational Research

    (1958)
  • W. Chafe

    Giveness, contrastiveness, definiteness, subjects, topics, and point of view

  • N. Chomsky

    Knowledge of language: It's nature, use, and origins

    (1986)
  • Christianson, K. 2001a. Odawa production data: Toward a better understanding of performance and competence. Paper...
  • K. Christianson

    An OT approach to variation in Odawa production data

    University of British Columbia Working Papers in Linguistics: Proceedings of WSCLA

    (2001)
  • K. Christianson

    Optimality theory in language production: The choice between direct and inverse in Odawa

    Linguistica Atlantica

    (2001)
  • Christianson, K. (2002). The age-related decrease of inverse usage in Odawa: Externally or internally driven? Paper...
  • Cited by (86)

    • Replication of Cutler, A., & Fodor, J. A. (1979). Semantic focus and sentence comprehension. Cognition, 7(1), 49–59

      2022, Journal of Memory and Language
      Citation Excerpt :

      The man on the corner was wearing the dark hat. In English and other languages, sentences are often structured so that given information precedes new information (Bock & Irwin, 1980; Christianson & Ferreira, 2005; Ferreira & Yoshita, 2003). This “given-before-new” strategy is thought to aid comprehension by allowing the listener to retrieve the long-term representations to which new information will be appended (Haviland & Clark, 1974).

    • Person-based prominence guides incremental interpretation: Evidence from obviation in Ojibwe

      2022, Cognition
      Citation Excerpt :

      In particular, SRCs with a first or second person direct object (e.g. the senator that saw me) may be harder to process than ORCs with a first or second person subject (e.g. the senator that I saw). Furthermore, while not directly related to RC processing, previous studies with speakers of Odawa (Nishnaabemwin), an Eastern dialect of Ojibwe, have shown that patterns of production (Christianson & Ferreira, 2005) and offline comprehension (Christianson & Cho, 2009) are sensitive to animal versus human distinctions: While inverse sentences are less commonly produced and more difficult to understand than direct sentences when a human noun is the agent, this difference disappears when an animal noun is the agent. What gives rise to person- and animacy-based expectations?

    • Good-enough language production

      2022, Trends in Cognitive Sciences
    View all citing articles on Scopus
    View full text