Schnur, T.
Rice University
Previous work about the extent of phonological planning during sentence production shows that at articulation, phonological encoding occurs for entire grammatical/phonological phrases, but encoding beyond the initial phrase may be due to the syntactic relevance of the verb in planning the utterance. I conducted three experiments to investigate whether phonological planning goes beyond the verb, crossing multiple grammatical phrase boundaries (as defined by the lexical heads of phrase) within a single phonological phrase. Using the picture-word interference paradigm, I found a significant phonological facilitation effect to both the verb and noun of sentences like “She kicks the ball”. In a third experiment I altered the frequency of the direct object and found longer utterance initiation times for sentences ending with a low-frequency vs. high-frequency object offering further support that the direct object was phonologically encoded at the time of utterance initiation. These results indicate that phonological planning is not necessarily restricted by grammatical phrase boundaries. That post-verb phonological properties were activated suggests that the grammatical importance of the verb did not drive the extent of phonological planning. These results suggest that all elements within a phonological phrase are encoded before articulation. Implications for models of sentence production are discussed.