Effects of Prompted Planning of Verbs and Subjects on Fluency and Accuracy in Describing Easy and Hard Events

Abstract

　　In a picture description task, speakers need to engage in complex processing to produce a sentence: apprehension of pictured events, and linguistic processing to retrieve and assemble words. The current study conducted an experiment to examine the effects of early retrieval of two primary elements of a sentence, namely, subjects and verbs, which were assumed to be related to the linear and hierarchical manners of sentence planning, on fluency and accuracy in the production of L2 English sentences. The experiment also investigated how the ease of apprehending pictured events (“event codability”), the significance of which has been recognized in recent psycholinguistic research, would affect the fluency and accuracy. Participants in the experiment were prompted to retrieve the names of the agent (subject) or action (verb) while previewing pictured events with varied ease of apprehension. The results revealed that early determination of verbs necessitated long reaction times particularly for a description of hard events. Early determination of subjects generally facilitated quick responses. A theoretical consideration for language production and implications for language teaching are offered.