Toward a unified account of the length effects in sentence production and comprehension

Abstract

Our research investigated how the long-before-short (LbS) preference affects sentence production and sentence comprehension, including the interconnectedness between the behavior of speakers and comprehenders by manipulating the relative length of the direct or indirect objects in ditransitive sentences in Korean. As a result, significant LbS preferences were observed not only in the production study where participants were asked to arrange the pre-given sentence fragments orally, but also in the comprehension study where the eye-movements of the participants were measured for reading the complete sentences. Moreover, our linear mixed-effect model revealed that the behavior of the speakers and comprehenders were closely related in a way that the structures speakers were more likely to produce were easier for comprehenders to understand. Our results are attributable to a language universal processing strategy to pack the heads of arguments and the predicate as closely as possible, for the facilitation of argument integration.