The effect of argument structure on the scope of advance planning

This study reanalysed and replicated two experiments of Momma and Ferreira (2021) to investigate whether the verb’s argument structure influences the scope of advance planning in unaccusative or unergative sentences of the type noun phrase (NP) + verb. Participants produced sentences after seeing an image and either a semantically-related or unrelated distractor verb with a stimulus onset asynchrony of -150ms. The onset latency and the NP duration were taken as dependent variables. In the reanalysis, semantically-related distractors yielded interference effects for both verb-types and led to more variance in onset latency and NP duration for unergative sentences. Considering all sentences started with “The”, participants may have uttered sentences before accessing the subject noun’s lemma. Interference effects in the NP duration may reflect both advance and incremental planning. We, therefore, replicated the study in Dutch which allows for the use of two determiners “de” and “het”. The data is currently undergoing analysis.