Importantly, if formulation is flexible, then

any changes in structure choice resulting from lexical and structural priming should also be accompanied by changes in the timecourse of formulation. Specifically, facilitating encoding of individual characters in Experiment 1 should result in an early accessibility effect: a first-fixated character should be produced in subject position more often if it had been primed than if it had not been primed, and speakers should spend more time fixating primed subject characters than unprimed subject characters immediately after picture onset (0–400 ms). Both results would indicate priority encoding of accessible characters before less accessible characters. This is analogous to the predicted effect of character codability on early formulation (Section 1.2), and indicates a shift towards linearly incremental planning. In contrast, facilitating encoding of sentence structure in Experiment 2 should reduce Everolimus price the likelihood of speakers fixating one character preferentially over the other character immediately after picture onset: speakers should be more likely to distribute their attention between two characters when producing a primed structure than an unprimed structure. This is similar to the predicted effect of event codability on formulation (Section 1.2) and illustrates a shift towards hierarchical incrementality.

Later in the formulation process (i.e., between 400 ms and speech onset),

the lexical and structural primes should both also influence the timing of gaze shifts from the first to the second character: lexical primes should reduce the length Gamma-secretase inhibitor Thiamet G of gazes on a primed subject character by facilitating encoding of its name and structural primes should reduce the length of gazes on the subject character by facilitating encoding of the entire event. Importantly, despite similar outcomes, the reasons for these effects can be traced back to qualitative differences in planning strategies in the two experiments. In sum, in two experiments, we undertook a systematic analysis of the influence of non-relational and relational variables on the timecourse of formulation for simple event descriptions. Similar results were expected for the two variables influencing the ease of non-relational processing (character codability and lexical accessibility) and the two variables influencing the ease of relational processing (event codability and ease of generating linguistic structures). Analyses in each experiment first verified whether all variables had the expected effect on speakers’ descriptions of target events (i.e., structure choice). First, character codability was expected to influence the assignment of characters to subject or object position based on their relative ease of naming in both experiments, and lexical priming was expected to produce a similar effect in Experiment 1.