Effect of ambiguity and lexical availability on syntactic and lexical production

Speakers only sometimes include the that in sentence complement structures like The coach knew (that) you missed practice. Six experiments tested the predictions concerning optional word mention of two general approaches to language produc-tion. One approach claims that language production processes choose syntactic structures that ease the task of creating sentences, so that words are spoken opportu-nistically, as they are selected for production. The second approach claims that a syntactic structure is chosen that is easiest to comprehend, so that optional words like that are used to avoid temporarily ambiguous, difficult-to-comprehend sen-tences. In all experiments, speakers did not consistently include optional words to circumvent a temporary ambiguity, but they did omit optional words (the comple-mentizer that) when subsequent material was either repeated (within a sentence) or prompted with a recall cue. The results suggest that speakers choose syntactic struc-tures to permit early mention of available material and not to circumvent disruptive temporary ambiguities. ª 2000 Academic Press With each use of a linguistic expression, two acts are accomplished. First