Having a syntactic choice is not always better: the effects of syntactic flexibility on Korean production

Abstract

Sentence production requires speakers to select lexical items and a structural frame necessary to communicate a message. The present study examines how Korean speakers choose between alternative syntactic structures. Following the methodology of Ferreira, we conducted a series of production studies investigating the effects of syntactic flexibility in Korean numeral quantifier constructions and active/passive constructions. Two models of sentence production make different predictions regarding the effects of syntactic flexibility. The competitive model predicts that syntactic flexibility should cause production difficulties (e.g. longer production latencies and more errors) because alternative structures compete for selection, restricting one another’s availability. In contrast, according to the incremental model, syntactic flexibility should facilitate production (e.g. shorter production latencies and fewer errors) because it allows more accessible lexical items to be accommodated sooner. Ferreira’s results support the incremental model in English. Our results, however, show that Korean speakers produced utterances more slowly in the flexible condition, which provides support for the competitive model. We suggest that the different findings in English and Korean are related to how they assign grammatical functions.