Die Planung von Äußerungen aus sprachübergreifender Sicht

• Applicant: Professorin Audrey Bürki, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
• Term: from 2018 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 416769916

Thoughts are holistic - thinking about a purple cow does not consist in thinking at something indefinite, something purple, and at a cow, sequentially- but the use of language requires that these thoughts be organized in time (such that the speaker says “a purple cow”, one word after the other). Speaking, like any cognitive task with a motor output, requires advanced planning. Planning strategies, e.g., how many words are planned ahead before the onset of articulation or in which order words are encoded within planning units, are poorly understood. Mixed findings across studies led several authors to suggest that planning strategies are flexible. The aim of the present project is to examine the principles that govern and limit this flexibility. It exploits the fact that in some utterances/languages, planning strategies are constraints by grammatical and phonological dependencies. In French for instance, the pronunciation of determiners or adjectives often depends on the gender of the noun (grammatical constraint, e.g., le beau chat ‘the nice cat’ vs. la belle pluie ‘the nice rain’), and on the phonology of the next word (phonological constraint, e.g., le beau chat vs. le bel âne ‘the nice donkey’). In order to produce these utterances without errors, speakers have no other choice but (1) to plan these utterances up to the end before the onset of articulation, and (2) to encode subsequent words first. In other words, phonological and grammatical constraints on word pronunciation define the minimal planning unit for these utterances and the order in which words are encoded. By contrast, in German, only grammatical information can constrain the pronunciation of determiners and adjectives (e.g., die Katze, der Tisch, große Katze, großer Tisch). The project examines the impact of cross-linguistic and cross-utterance differences in grammatical and phonological constraints on planning strategies, with several aims. The first aim is to test the hypothesis that flexibility in planning is limited by these constraints, when present. The second aim is to show that above these constraints, flexibility is used to accommodate communicative needs. The last aim is to determine whether planning strategies obey maximum consistency (all utterances of a certain type are planned similarly) or optimization principles (planning is adapted to the local requirements of each utterance) within and across languages. Three series of behavioural experiments will be conducted in which participants are asked to produce utterances of difference structures. Data will be collected in German, French, and English as utterances in these languages differ in the sets of grammatical and phonological constraints on word pronunciation. In addition, to providing novel insights into the cognitive architecture of the language production system, the present project will contribute to the long-standing debate about language-specificity versus language universals in language use.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants