Planning messages and sentences with familiar perceptual and syntactic structures

If message and sentence planning are closely linked processes, planning scope may vary depending on what speakers want to say and how they say it. We compared speakers’ gaze pattern to pictures in displays eliciting sentences like “The lion and the tiger are above the basket” when speakers were a) more familiar or less familiar with the spatial layout of these displays, and b) more familiar or less familiar with the phrasal structures used in these sentences. Familiarity with spatial layout was induced by presenting prime trials with a similar or dissimilar layout of pictures (“The bell and the nail are above/below the crutch”) before the target trial, and familiarity with sentence structure was manipulated via structural priming (prime trials elicited sentences like “The bell and the nail are above the crutch” or “The bell is above the nail and the crutch”). When describing pictures on target trials, speakers looked earlier at the second object (tiger) when they were familiar with both the spatial layout and sentence structure, but speech onsets were reduced (structural priming) only when both spatial layout and sentence structure were repeated. The results show that linguistic planning is facilitated by congruence between message-level and sentence-level structure