Dependencies First: Eye Tracking Evidence from Sentence Production in Tagalog

We investigated the time course of sentence formulation in Tagalog, a verb-initial language in which the verb obligatorily agrees with one of its arguments. Eye-tracked participants de-scribed pictures of transitive events. Fixations to the two characters in the events were compared across sentences dif-fering in agreement marking and post-verbal word order. Fix-ation patterns show evidence for two temporally dissociated phases in Tagalog sentence production. The first, driven by verb agreement, involves early linking of concepts to syntac-tic functions; the second, driven by word order, involves in-cremental lexical encoding of these concepts. These results suggest that even the earliest stages of sentence formulation may be guided by a language's grammatical structure