Does syntactic information affect the production of bare nouns?Research into this issue has explored word-specific features (e.g.,gender). However, word-independent syntactic distributions mayalso play a role. For example, studies of word recognition haveuncovered strong effects of the diversity of a word's syntacticdistribution – its syntactic flexibility – on response times in thelexical decision paradigm. By contrast, studies of sentenceproduction have produced strong but conflicted effects of syntacticflexibility. We propose that syntactic flexibility also affectsproduction of individual words. We reanalyze a database ofpreviously collected timed picture naming data using two novelmeasures of syntactic flexibility, one based on the relationsstemming from the noun, and one based on the relations extendingto the noun. Our results show that nouns that project a diversearray of structures are produced faster, and those that are integratedinto a diverse array of structures are produced slower.

Usage-based theories of syntax predict that words and syntactic constructions are probabilistically interconnected. If this is true, then words that occur in similar distributions of syntactic constructions should prime each other. These effects should be fine-grained; even small differences between the syntactic distributions of pairs of words of the same grammatical category should cause variation in priming. Prior research from production suggests that this prediction should hold even in tasks without any syntactic requirement. In this study, we introduce a measure of the similarity between the syntactic contexts in which two nouns occur. We show that this similarity measure significantly predicts visual lexical decision priming magnitudes between pairs of nouns. This finding is consistent with the predictions of usage-based theories where fine-grained similarity of syntactic usages between prime-target pairs affects decision latencies, over and above any effects attributable to semantic similarity.

We model the causal links between child language (CL) andchild-directed language (CDL). We take pairs of sequences oflinguistic measurements from a longitudinal study. Each child-mother pair of sequences is considered as an instance of thetrajectory of a high-dimensional dynamical system. We thenuse Multispatial Convergent Cross Mapping to ascertain thedirections of causality between the pairs of sequences, that is,whether the complexity of CL drives that of CDL, the com-plexity of CDL drives that of CL, both, or neither. We find thatchildren are responsive to the amount of speech and the diver-sity of words produced by their mothers, but not vice-versa.However, the syntactic diversities of the children’s utterancesdrive the syntactic diversity of the mothers’ utterances. This isevidence for fine-grained fine-tuning of CDL in response onlyto the syntax of CL.

We present an analysis of a treebank of spontaneous English dyadic conversations, investigating whether the degree of syntactic priming found across speakers is a function of the degrees of a?ective alignment and over- all positivity of the speakers. We use information theory to measure the proportion of overlap between the syn- tactic structures of the speakers. The a?ective state of the speakers is indexed by aggregated measures of the a?ective valences of the words they use. We ?nd that there is a positive relation between syntactic priming and a?ective alignment, over and above any lexical rep- etition e?ects. This constitutes evidence for the percola- tion of inter-speaker alignment across multiple levels of representation. This also illustrates the indexical value of syntactic alignment, as has been proposed in modern functional theories of grammar such as Dialogic Syntax.

Many theories of memory propose some type of short- term store limited in capacity to a small number of in- formation chunks. However, although short-term ver- bal memory is generally considered to be a crucial component of language processing, the relevant infor- mation chunk level that may de?ne capacity limits in ecologically-valid spoken language has never been inves- tigated. The Intonation Unit (IU), an intermediate-level prosodic phrase, has been theorized to be a fundamental unit of spoken language, the focus of a speaker's mental processing. This suggests that IUs might play a role as the relevant unit representing \chunks" of spoken lan- guage. We report the results of an experiment investi- gating the role of IUs in short-term memory in a serial recall task. We found a signi?cant non-linear e?ect of stimulus size in IUs, but not clauses. We conclude that Intonation Units are the primary linguistic unit used for chunking spoken language input in memory.