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