Accessibility effects on production vary cross-linguistically: Evidence from English and Korean

Abstract

Previous work on English suggests that accessibility of individual lexical items plays an important role in shaping speakers’ choice of sentence structure, providing evidence for lexically incremental production. In order to investigate the role of accessibility in cross-linguistic production, we manipulated accessibility in English and Korean via semantic priming in Experiment 1 and visual cueing in Experiment 2. We recorded English and Korean speakers’ speech and eye movements as they described pictured events. The production results show that English speakers’ choice of sentence structure was significantly affected by semantic priming or visual cueing, consistent with the findings of prior research: Priming the patient entity significantly increased the production of passive sentences. In contrast, Korean speakers’ choice of sentence structure was not influenced by accessibility of lexical items. Analyses of participants’ eye-movements are consistent with the production results. In Experiment 1, English speakers fixated the semantically primed entity in the visual scene, whereas Korean speakers did not. Even when the visual cueing manipulation drew Korean speakers’ focus of attention toward the cued entity in Experiment 2, Korean speakers’ choice of the first referent was not influenced by the lexical accessibility. These findings strongly suggest that lexically incremental production is not a universal production mechanism. In light of the typological differences between English and Korean, we suggest that the relative contributions of accessibility during language production are mediated by the grammatical constraints of a language.