J Psycholinguist Res DOI 10.1007/s10936-015-9361-7

Salience Effects: L2 Sentence Production as a Window on L1 Speech Planning Inés Antón-Méndez1 · Chip Gerfen2 · Miguel Ramos3

the date of receipt and acceptance should be inserted later © Springer Science+Business Media New York 2015

Abstract Salience influences grammatical structure during production in a languagedependent manner because different languages afford different options to satisfy preferences. During production, speakers may always try to satisfy all syntactic encoding preferences (e.g., salient entities to be mentioned early, themes to be assigned the syntactic function of object) and adjust when this is not possible (e.g., a salient theme in English) or, alternatively, they may learn early on to associate particular conceptual configurations with particular syntactic frames (e.g., salient themes with passives). To see which of these alternatives is responsible for the production of passives when dealing with a salient theme, we looked at the second language effects of salience for English-speaking learners of Spanish, where the two preferences can be satisfied simultaneously by fronting the object (Prat-Sala and Branigan in J Mem Lang 42:168–182, 2000). In accordance with highly incremental models of language production, English speakers appear to quickly make use of the alternatives in the second language that allow observance of more processing preferences. Keywords production

Sentence planning · Salience · Thematic roles · Syntactic function · Language

Introduction The question of how speakers build a sentence that most adequately fits their communication intentions has been the subject of intensive research both with respect to the “what” and the “how” of grammatical processing. Several factors appear to play a role in the choice of

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Inés Antón-Méndez [email protected]

1

Linguistics, BCSS, University of New England, Armidale, NSW 2351, Australia

2

Department of World Languages and Cultures, American University, Washington, DC, USA

3

Department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese, The Pennsylvania State University, State College, PA, USA

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grammatical structure, some perceptual (e.g., visual prominence), some conceptual (e.g., animacy, agenthood), and some more linguistic in nature (e.g., discourse salience, topicality; for an overview, see Bock et al. 2004). Regarding the manner in which the constituents of a sentence are processed, there is a general consensus that speakers build sentences incrementally, which means that production depends to a certain extent on the accessibility of information and the ease of processing of the linguistic components required for its expression (BrownSchmidt and Konopka 2008; Kempen and Hoenkamp 1987; Levelt 1989; Wheeldon et al. 2013). That is why factors that increase the salience of a noun, such as animacy, have been found to affect noun placement within the sentence such that, all other things being equal, the more prominent the noun the earlier it will be mentioned and the more prominent its syntactic position within the sentence (e.g., subject; Bock et al. 1992; Bock and Warren 1985; Branigan et al. 2008; Coco and Keller 2009; Ferreira 1994; Gleitman et al. 2007; McDonald et al. 1993; Tanaka et al. 2011; Vogels et al. 2013). But there is more to sentence building than putting first things first—the sentence has to express the event relations intended by the speaker, and each language has a limited number of basic syntactic structures that can accommodate these relations. Cross-linguistically, for example, there is a strong correlation between the thematic role of sentence constituents and the grammatical functions they adopt in the sentence. Thus, in transitive events, agents exhibit a strong tendency to be encoded as subjects, while themes1 have a strong tendency to be encoded as objects (Ackerman and Moore 2001; Bock and Levelt 1994). As a consequence of these two broad tendencies of placing salient constituents early and making themes direct objects (DO), one would expect salient themes to be produced as early direct objects. However, speakers also need to enssure that the sentences they produce conform to the linguistic restrictions of the target language, and some languages, such as English, do not easily allow a direct object to be placed in sentence initial position. Therefore, in processing a salient theme, a speaker of a strict SVO language will be confronted with two conflicting preferences or biases: put the salient theme early in the sentence, and encode it as a DO. In such circumstances, English speakers have been found to increase the rate of passive sentences—i.e., the salient entities are then more likely to be assigned the function of subject and mentioned early in the sentence even if this yields an otherwise dispreferred passive construction (Bock et al. 1992; Bock and Warren 1985; Prat-Sala and Branigan 2000). The question we address in this article is: how are such strategies implemented and achieved? For languages with freer word order, such as Spanish, speakers can accommodate both preferences by producing a OVS, an VOS, or even an OVS sentence, all of which give the DO a more prominent position in the sentence. In this regard, Prat-Sala and Branigan (2000) found that when Spanish speakers encounter a salient theme, they tend to increase the rate of object dislocation (e.g., “al niño lo atropelló la bicicleta”, “the boy, him ran over the bike”, instead of “la bicicleta atropelló al niño”, “the bike ran over the boy”), producing an OVS instead of the canonical SVO structure. It should be noted, however, that the likelihood of a theme being assigned the syntactic function of subject in English or resulting in a dislocated object in Spanish seems to depend on other factors apart from salience. For example, in English, the production of passive sentences can also be increased due to the phenomenon of syntactic priming (Bock 1986), one of whose functions may be alignment with the speaker (Ferreira and Bock 2006). All in all, the conclusion is that we still cannot predict with total certainty of control fully which syntactic structure will be produced in a particular situation because we still do not 1 The term ‘theme’ is used here as a sort of catch-all for roles that are usually associated with the syntactic

function of direct object such as patient, recipient, and theme.

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know the exact conditions required for one or another sentence type to successfully fulfill the communicative intention of the speaker. In general, under any experimental condition, whether favoring a default active sentence or a marked syntactic construction, there are always alternative syntactic frames produced by speakers. Although this could be taken as a sign of the production system being probabilistic in nature, it is more reasonable to assume that speakers mostly say what they intend to say (within the limits imposed by their language, of course), rather than being at the mercy of a probabilistic system and ending up saying something more or less related to what they set out to say. Thus, even allowing for a certain degree of probabilistic behavior at some level (e.g., errors can happen), the bulk of the production should be guided by a principle of fidelity to the communicative intention. In which case, the variability observed in the speakers’ output in, for example, Prat-Sala and Branigan (2000), is most likely due to the influence of other factors not controlled for. The production of active sentences in the salient theme condition could be due to the manipulations meant to increase the salience of the theme not having been entirely successful; and the equivalent production of passive sentences and dislocated objects by the Spanish speakers could be due to other unidentified conditions favoring a passive sentence over a dislocated object in some cases. After all, if the passive sentence is an option in Spanish, it is probably because it fulfills an expressive need that the dislocated object does not. At any rate, it appears there is a set of conditions that leads a Spanish speaker to produce a dislocated object, while leading an English speaker to produce a passive instead since the dislocated object option is not present in the latter’s native language. This set of conditions will minimally include the existence of a salient theme and possibly other conditions not known at this time. It is on these sentences that would have been a dislocated object in Spanish but seem to surface as a passive in English that the following discussion is focused. Prat-Sala and Branigan’s (2000) results indicate that speakers do try to accommodate both preferences to a considerable extent when the language allows it—in this case by exploiting the affordances of Spanish’s less rigid ordering of syntactic constituents. English speakers, however, do not have this option and need to make a choice regarding sentence structure and syntactic function assignment. Given the incrementality of language production, the question is at which point speakers opt for one or the other alternatives, or realize that it is not possible to proceed in the way they have started to prepare their sentence and need to back-track. Consider, for example, the scenario of English speakers who, in dealing with a salient theme, might start processing it first by virtue of its high salience (e.g., at the message level in a model such as that proposed by Bock and Levelt 1994), and may also initially earmark it as accusative by virtue of its being a theme conceptually (e.g., at the functional processing level), which would then force the speaker later (e.g., at the positional processing level), due to language-specific constraints, to either revise this assignment or wait for more information to come through while buffering the already processed constituent until it can be incorporated into the unfolding sentence. Alternatively, English speakers could fine-tune their preferences in childhood as a result of repeated experience with such scenarios by adopting a general strategy of opting for a passive syntactic structure when a salient theme (and possibly some additional conditions) is encountered (as modeled in Chang et al. 2006, p. 243). While such fine-tuning during first language acquisition on the basis of experience would be more compatible with interactive models of language production (e.g., Bates and MacWhinney 1989; Dell et al. 1999), both alternatives can in principle be explained within either a serial or an interactive production model. It could be, for example, that Englishspeaking children learn to associate salient themes with a passive syntactic structure as a special case of a more general need for child learners to establish pairings between particular

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conceptual configurations and particular syntactic structures when they are acquiring the grammar of their language—an option compatible with grammatical encoding being the result of activation of full-fledged syntactic structures and with production models where speakers primarily plan their utterances based on the global structure of an event, rather than by taking into account the salience of individual elements (Bock et al. 2004; Griffin and Bock 2000). Alternatively, speakers could be less farsighted and build the syntactic frame in a more piecemeal, even slightly haphazard fashion (Ferreira 1996). A third possibility is that speakers resolve the conflicts that arise when the different features call for linguistically incompatible choices by computing the best syntactic structure to fit a particular discourse context anew every time, in effect weighing all the preferences and attempting to find the optimal solution for their communicative intention given the available options in the target language. In sum, the behavior observed in experimental studies of language production where English speakers are found to resort to the use of a passive sentence under conditions (including a salient theme) that make Spanish speakers instead opt for a dislocated object construction could be the result of: (1) initially trying to satisfy the two preferences (trying to give the salient theme an early slot in the sentence as well as encoding it as a syntactic object), and revising these choices when they are found to be incompatible in the target language; (2) considering the two preferences each time – i.e., whether to output the salient theme first as the subject of a passive, or to assign it to a DO function and produce an active sentence, and reaching a decision at the point at which it becomes necessary to commit to one; (3) learning through experience during the sensitive period of language acquisition that certain configuration of conditions presenting a salient theme should be expressed with a passive. The outcomes of scenarios 1 and 2, however, would be similar enough that, at this time, it is not easy to distinguish between the two. Thus, these options can be reduced to two: English speakers under these circumstances either initially consider or attempt to satisfy all the linguistic preferences, or they avoid the conflict by dispensing with one of the preferences (i.e., active) early on. If English speakers processing a salient theme are immediately driven to choose between a passive construction (i.e., processing the constituent on the basis of its salience), or the option of buffering it until it can be inserted after the verb in an active sentence (i.e., processing it on the basis of its preferred syntactic function), it would support the position that grammatical encoding is the result of whole syntactic frame activation. This could happen if, for example, event semantics in interaction with thematic role activation determines the final syntactic structure early on, and lexical items are then processed incrementally as they become active and can be inserted in pre-planned positions. Children would then need to learn to associate particular conceptual messages with particular whole syntactic frames. Such an account is compatible with evidence of competition between alternative syntactic structures (Myachykov et al. 2013), and with results of syntactic priming studies where full structural frames seem to be primed independently of lexical, thematic or argument structure similarity (Bock et al. 1992; Smith and Wheeldon 2001). Furthermore, this kind of structural priming has been found to take place not just under experimental conditions, but in naturalistic settings as well (Gries 2005), suggesting it accurately reflects spontaneous language production. On the other hand, English speakers may be processing the message constituents by juggling multiple production preferences and adjusting the output at every junction to match previously taken decisions which then constrain downstream possibilities. This processing strategy would be more congenial with fully incremental views of language production in terms of syntactic structure building as well as lexical processing and integration in the

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syntactic frame (Ferreira 1996), and with findings attesting to the limited scope of grammatical planning (Wheeldon et al. 2013). As a means of differentiating between these possibilities in a novel fashion, we examine the behavior in their second language of English native speakers who are late learners of Spanish (henceforth L2 Spanish speakers). Because of the difficulty of automatizing linguistic procedures late in life (Ullman 2005), late L2 speakers often transfer L1 processing strategies to their L2 (Ionin and Montrul 2010; Schwartz and Sprouse 1996; Slabakova 2000), and this transfer can be evidenced at any point in the chain—from message formulation (AntónMéndez 2010; Murcia-Serra 2003) to grammatical processing (Antón-Méndez 2011; Foucart and Frenck-Mestre 2011). Therefore, there is good reason to expect L2 Spanish speakers to continue to deploy native English processing strategies with respect to salient themes in their L2 Spanish. Assuming such transfer effects, when dealing with a salient theme, English–Spanish speakers should either: (a) produce mostly passives in Spanish if that is the automatized processing path followed in English under these circumstances; or (b) produce more sentences with a prominent object such as dislocated object sentences, like native speakers of Spanish do, if the native automatic processing is compatible with this outcome. The logic of scenario (b) is the following: if English speakers are not committing to a full structural plan early on in their own native language and instead are trying to accommodate the two underlying preferences for keeping the patient as the direct object as well as placing the salient entity earlier in the sentence until such point at which this becomes untenable in English, their L2 production in Spanish will afford them a choice (object dislocation as well as other structures that place the object in a more prominent position) that is not easily available in English. In this sense, their L2 production arguably provides a window on the mechanism at work in their L1 English sentence planning. In the experiment presented below, we test these predictions on a group of proficient L2 English–Spanish speakers.

Method The experimental design and materials were based on Prat-Sala and Branigan’s (2000) method adapted for the L2 target population.

Participants Eighteen native speakers of English who spoke Spanish as a second language, 10 females and 8 males, participated in this experiment in exchange for a small monetary compensation of US$10. Recruitment took place at The Pennsylvania State University (US) where all but one of the participants were studying or working. Their ages ranged from 19 to 35 years old, with an average of 25 years old (S D = 4.58). They all had at least some years of tertiary education, with the majority (N = 11) having finished a masters or doctorate degree. For the effect of interest to become evident, we needed late L2 speakers who would not have automatized the Spanish native preferences before the end of the sensitive period of language acquisition. They also had to be relatively fluent, so that production in their L2 would proceed smoothly and without much conscious monitoring, and sufficiently proficient with the second language to be familiar with syntactic structures that are not very frequent and are likely to be acquired later. All participants had been born and spent their childhood in the US, on average they had started to learn Spanish at the age of 12 (S D = 4.44), and most were very fluent, having

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become so on average around the age of 20 (S D = 5.19). There were three participants who did not consider themselves to be fully fluent, although two of them had very balanced language preferences (50–50 and 40–50 Spanish–English). One participant reported being already fluent in Spanish before puberty, at age 5. Given the small number of participants and the difficulty of recruiting ideal L2 English–Spanish speakers, we decided to include these participants in our analyses as they did not behave differently than the rest of the cohort. Proficiency was assessed by means of an ad-hoc test consisting of the set of questions on grammar and vocabulary from the intermediate (B2) and advanced (C1) levels of the standardized Certificate of Spanish as a Foreign Language (Diploma de Español como Lengua Extranjera, DELE). The final test comprised 23 vocabulary and 47 grammar multiple choice questions, which took 30–40 min to complete. Out of the 70 questions, participants’ correct scores in this test ranged from 25 (36 %) to 66 (94 %), with an average of 46.11 (66 %) and a standard deviation of 9.88 (14 %). A second measure of proficiency was the result of averaging participants’ self-ratings on a scale of 1 to 10 regarding speaking, comprehension and reading ability (M = 7.54, S D = 1.36). Self-rating has been found to be a reliable measure of proficiency for experienced speakers (Ross 1998). The two proficiency measures were highly correlated (Spearman’s ρ = .593, p = .005), validating the use of the grammar and vocabulary sections of the DELE as a quick test of proficiency. Given the results of these measures of proficiency, our participants can be said to have an intermediate to advanced level in Spanish.

Materials There were 45 items consisting of the following sequence: preamble, probe question, target picture. All of the sentences were in Spanish. They were recorded by the first author using Audacity and edited with Praat. The preambles provided the background to interpret the picture, which depicted an event meant to be the outcome of the situation described in the preamble. Sixteen of the items were experimental items and 24 were filler items. The other five items were practice items. The experimental and filler preambles were based on the ones used by Prat-Sala and Branigan (2000) in their Spanish experiment 2. These were only slightly modified where, in the view of the first and third authors (both native Spanish speakers), they needed to be adapted to the level of the L2 speakers (e.g., “encarado en la dirección opuesta”, “facing in the opposite direction”, became “mirando hacia el otro lado”, “looking the other way”). None of the items was substantially modified: the number and position of head nouns, the number and position of modifiers, and the overall sentence structures were maintained in order to make our results comparable with those reported by Prat-Sala and Branigan. The experimental pictures2 depicted an event that could be described with a transitive verb (provided with the picture to assist participants) and involved an animate theme and an inanimate agent. Following Prat-Sala and Branigan’s (2000) design, there were two conditions according to whether the animate theme or the inanimate agent was the most salient entity in the preamble. There were thus two versions for each experimental preamble, with the theme or the agent entity being the most salient by virtue of being introduced first, being preceded by the existential ‘there was’ (había), having a modifying adjective, and having several properties predicated on it. The less salient entity, on the other hand, was introduced 2 The experimental pictures were the same black and white line drawings used by Prat-Sala and Branigan

(2000).

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last and had no accompanying modifiers. The following are examples of the two conditions preceding the picture in Prat-Sala and Branigan’s (2000, Figure 2), with the salient entity underlined: 1. Salient Animate Theme-:Había un hombre mayor y bajito en el patio de la escuela al lado de un columpio, paseando tras un día muy duro de trabajo (There was a little old man in the playground of the school near a swing, going for a walk after a very hard day at work) 2. Salient Inanimate Agent-:Había un columpio viejo y oxidado en el patio de la escuela al lado de un hombre, balanceándose libremente a causa del viento (There was an old rusty swing in a playground of the school near a man, swaying freely because of the wind) The filler pictures3 , in contrast, depicted events that could better be described with an intransitive verb (also provided with the picture in this experiment). Twelve of the filler preambles were similar to the experimental preambles, half of them introducing first an animate and the other half an inanimate entity. The remaining twelve filler preambles did not start with the existential ‘there was’, but rather introduced the animate or inanimate entity right away as the subject of the sentence (e.g., “un hombre de mediana edad vestido con un abrigo largo y un gorro de lana iba andando por una calle de la ciudad un día muy frío de invierno”, “a middle aged man dressed in a long coat and woollen hat was walking on a city street during a very cold winter day”). All the preambles were followed by the probe question “¿qué pasó?” (“what happened?”). Finally, to ensure that participants were paying attention to the preambles, a third of the filler items were followed by a control question about information given in the preamble (e.g., about the color of a garment mentioned in the preamble).

Procedure After signing the consent form, participants took the proficiency test. This was followed by the experiment (programmed in e-prime 2). Lastly, they filled out a language history questionnaire. The whole session lasted between 1 and 1.5 hours. For the experiment, participants were told they would hear a story in Spanish before seeing a picture, and their task was to recount with one sentence in Spanish what had happened according to the picture, and to do it in such a way that some other participants later on would be able to match their descriptions with the right picture. This was just a ruse to ensure interest in giving accurate picture descriptions. They were told they would see a verb under each picture, which they could use in their response if they wanted. To encourage participants to listen to the preambles, they were also told that after some of the pictures they would hear a question about the preamble, which they would have to answer. After a short practice session, participants were left to finish the experiment on their own. Item presentation was individually randomized. Each trial started with the presentation of the preamble in auditory and written form (for comprehension support) followed by the probe question “¿qué pasó?” (“what happened?). Participants then saw the picture and, underneath, a suggested verb for describing it. This modification of the procedure originally followed by Prat-Sala and Branigan (2000) was meant to ensure that participants would not skip items due to difficulties in retrieving L2 lexical items. The picture remained on the screen for 10 seconds. Participants’ responses were digitally recorded (using Marantz PMD660). The procedure is schematized in Fig. 1. 3 The filler pictures were drawn by the first author in the same style as the experimental ones.

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Había un hombre de meciana edad… Había un hombre de mediana edad… ¿Qué pasó?

Volar

El gorro se voló

Fig. 1 Experimental procedure sequence of events

Scoring All responses where a sentence (including sentences left incomplete but containing a verb) describing the picture was produced were coded with respect to the syntactic structure used. Given the speaker population, we did not impose very strict guidelines about only including fully correct sentences. The nature of the population under study also meant we had to make adjustments to the categories considered by Prat-Sala and Branigan. Most notably, while the native speakers seemed to have been very consistent in their choices and they could restrict the number of categories to just passives, just actives, or just dislocated objects, our population produced a number of alternative structures that are nevertheless equivalent to the dislocated object construction and compatible with the thesis put forward here in that they present the object in a more prominent, earlier slot in the sentence by making use of a syntactic option that is acceptable in Spanish but not English. The following categories were considered: • Active—canonical SVO sentences, even if the direct object had been substituted by a pronoun or was missing (e.g., “el viento se llevó…”, “the wind took…”). • Passive—passive sentences, even if the by-phrase with the agent had been omitted (20 % of the cases, e.g., “el soldado fue atropellado”, “the soldier was run over”). • Prominent-Object—acceptable syntactic structures in which the object had been moved to a more prominent position in the sentence such as full dislocated object constructions (e.g., “al hombre el avión le golpeó”, “the man, the plane hit”), VOS sentences (e.g., “le atropelló a la mujer el tren”, “ran over the woman, the train”), and reduced dislocated

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object constructions (e.g., *“se le atropelló la bicicleta”, lit. “himself him ran over, the bike”); as well as other attempts to produce a suitable sentence with the animate noun first which consisted mainly of reflexive constructions (e.g., “se golpeó el niño con una pelota de beísbol”, “hit himself, the boy, with a baseball”) even if they were not correct (e.g., ? “el jugador electrocutó” instead of “el jugador se electrocutó”, “the player electrocuted” instead of “the player electrocuted himself”). • Miscellaneous—this category contained other types of syntactic structures not scorable according to the above criteria, such as attempts at reflexives where the pronoun referring to the animate entity appeared first, but the actual NP for the animate entity was either missing or appeared at the end of the sentence, making it difficult to determine whether the animate object preceded or followed the subject (e.g., “se le cayó la nieve al esquiador”, “him took the snow, the skier”); it also contained void responses (sentences in English and sentences which clearly showed the participant had not paid attention to the preamble) and missing data points (“I don’t know” or “no” responses, as well as no responses).

Results Out of 288 possible responses, 190 (66 %) were canonical active sentences, 21 (7 %) were passives, 44 (15 %) were constructions with a prominent direct object, and 33 (12 %) were considered miscellaneous responses either because they contained other syntactic constructions (6 sentences in total) or were void or missing responses (27 sentences in total). The breakdown of sentence types per condition is shown in Table 1. We analyzed only the scoring categories of interest. For each, we initially ran a linear mixed effects model that included condition (Salient Inanimate Agent or Salient Animate Theme) and proficiency score as fixed factors and crossed-random intercepts and maximal slopes for subjects and items. Failure to converge in all cases required the removal of the by-item slope for the interaction of proficiency score and condition, as the higher order slope with the smallest variance (Barr et al. 2013). Additional failures to converge further required the elimination of the by-item slope of proficiency in the models for Active and Passive responses. For active and passive responses, the simplest model maximizing log-likelihood contained only the fixed factor of condition, which was significant in both cases (see Table 2), with significantly more Active and significantly fewer Passive sentences in the Salient Inanimate Agent than in the Salient Animate Theme condition. For Prominent-Object responses, there was no improvement in goodness of fit for the model including interaction of proficiency Table 1 Average number of sentences of each type produced in each condition, standard deviations (in brackets), and percentages with respect to total number of items per condition

Condition Active Passive Prominent object Miscellaneous

In inanimate, An animate

Salient In. Agent

Salient An. Theme

5.83 (1.10)

4.72 (1.78)

72.9 %

59.0 %

0.33 (0.84)

0.83 (1.38)

4.2 %

10.4 %

0.83 (1.15)

1.61 (1.24)

10.4 %

20.0 %

1.00 (0.91)

0.83 (0.92)

12.5 %

10.4 %

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J Psycholinguist Res Table 2 Results of the three best fit (log likelihood) lme models, one for each of the scoring categories of interest, with condition (Salient Animate Theme over Salient Inanimate Agent) and proficiency as fixed factors and crossed random factors of subjects and items β

Response

Fixed effect

Active

Condition

0.58

0.17

3.53

Passive

Condition

−0.58

0.28

−2.10

.036∗

Condition

−0.49

0.22

−2.21

.027∗

0.05

0.02

2.26

.024∗

Prominent object

Proficiency

SE

z

p < .0001∗∗∗

and condition indicating that this factor did not account for variance in the data. In the best fit model of Prominent-Object responses, both condition and proficiency were significant, as more Prominent-Object responses were associated with the Salient Animate Theme condition and with higher proficiency scores. See Table 2 for results. In sum, in contrast with conditions in which an inanimate agent is the salient entity, in conditions where an animate theme is the salient entity, the production of active sentences decreases, while the production of passives as well as that of other marked syntactic structures (i.e., Prominent-Object) increases. We also wanted to compare our results with those of Prat-Sala and Branigan (2000). However, because the nature of our participant cohort necessitated that we make different coding decisions regarding the constructions with prominent objects, we did not think it appropriate to make a direct comparison for this category. Instead, for this comparison, we focused on the active and passive sentences only, since the coding guidelines were equivalent across the two studies. The Prominent-Object sentences were then pooled with the Miscellaneous responses for the L2 Spanish speakers and, similarly, responses coded as Dislocation in Prat-Sala and Branigan’s (2000) were pooled with responses coded as Other both for the native English and for the Spanish speakers. Since the set of experimental stimuli was the same in all experiments (barring necessary linguistic adjustments from English to Spanish to slightly simpler Spanish), and coding guidelines for actives and passives were the same across experiments, this allowed us to make direct comparisons between the three populations. Figure 2 shows the production of these three categories for the Salient Animate Theme condition in contrast with the Salient Inanimate Agent condition for the three groups of speakers: English native speakers, Spanish native speakers (native speakers’ data taken from Prat-Sala and Branigan 2000)4 , and L2 Spanish speakers. A series of Chi-square tests was performed comparing the L2 Spanish speakers’ distribution of responses in the 3 categories in each of the conditions (Salient Inanimate Agent and Salient Animate Theme) with the distribution of responses of either the native English speakers, the native Spanish speakers, or a hypothetical speaker in between the two (i.e., the average of the two native speaking populations). For the Salient Inanimate Agent condition, the L2 Spanish speakers were found to be significantly different from the English native speakers and the hypothetical “in-between” speaker (both p’s < .01), but not from the native Spanish speakers ( p = .090). On the other hand, for the Salient Animate Theme condition, the L2 Spanish speakers were found to be significantly different from both populations of native speakers and from the idealized “in-between” speaker (all p’s < .001). 4 For comparability purposes, English and Spanish percentages in Fig. 2 are calculated with respect to the

total number of cases instead of with respect to all passive/active responses, as in Prat-Sala and Branigan’s (2000, Table 1.

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Salient In.Agent Salient An.Theme

70.00 60.00 50.00 40.00 30.00 20.00 10.00

Active

Passive

Spanish

Eng-Spa

English

Spanish

Eng-Spa

English

Spanish

Eng-Spa

English

0.00

Other responses

Fig. 2 Percentage of sentences of different types produced by native speakers of English and Spanish (PratSala and Branigan 2000), and English speakers of L2 Spanish in each of the two conditions (Salient Animate Theme and Salient Inanimate Agent)

The L2 Spanish speakers resemble Prat-Sala and Branigan’s Spanish speakers in the base condition when an active sentence is most appropriate (for the Salient Inanimate Agent), but are unique when the experimental manipulation forces them to choose alternative syntactic constructions, opting for a passive neither to the same extent as English speakers in their native language, nor to the extent native speakers of Spanish do in their native language.

Discussion In this experiment, English speakers of Spanish as a second language had to describe events that sometimes presented them with conflicting processing preferences – a salient animate entity in the role of theme which, by virtue of being animate and being salient, tends to be preferentially placed earlier in the sentence while, by virtue of being a theme, tends to be preferentially assigned the syntactic function of direct object. This contextual configuration results in a conflict of preferences in English because of the relatively fixed word order in this language – a conflict that is often resolved with the choice of a passive construction (62 % passive use for an animate salient theme as opposed to 10 % for an inanimate nonsalient theme in Prat-Sala and Branigan 2000, Table 1) where the theme is assigned the syntactic function of subject and can therefore be placed early in the sentence. In Spanish, on the other hand, it is possible to satisfy both sets of preferences by moving the object to a more prominent position in order to produce constructions in which the direct object is mentioned before the subject of the sentence and this seems indeed to be one of the chosen options for Spanish speakers (the other chosen option is passives (24 % dislocation and 23 % passivisation for animate salient themes in Prat-Sala and Branigan 2000); see the Introduction for a possible explanation for this variability). We hypothesized that a form of object dislocation should also become a preferred option for native speakers of English in their L2 Spanish if grammatical encoding is done in a piecemeal fashion and the final syntactic structure of a proposition is the result of a tug-of-war between different constraints

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and preferences determining choices at different times. On the other hand, if grammatical encoding is decided virtually in toto from the beginning and speakers have to commit early on to a particular sentence frame, associations between particular contextual configurations and particular structures are likely to become entrenched (as evidence of the pervasive effect of L1 on L2 early language production stages, see for example Antón-Méndez 2010; MurciaSerra 2003), and L2 Spanish speakers would be expected to keep producing the structures that are appropriate for the L1 even when not very felicitous or not the preferred option in the L2. What we found is L2 Spanish speakers do produce significantly fewer actives and significantly more passives when the theme is the most salient entity but, crucially, they also produced significantly more prominent object constructions in this condition as expected if they had started making use of the options afforded by the new language to output the salient theme as a DO in a prominent sentence position, therefore avoiding the forced choice required in their own native language. Furthermore, there is an effect of proficiency on the number of Prominent-Object responses which is likely to be the result of more advanced speakers having at their disposal a greater number of less frequent L2 syntactic constructions (e.g., OVS, VOS, as well as reflexives) than the less advanced speakers to help them fully process the information as it becomes available and produce an acceptable L2 sentence. Although these results are compatible with the view that sentences are built incrementally, with the speaker making successive structural decisions as required rather than choosing a full syntactic frame to fit the concept to be expressed, there is another possibility. It could be that L2 Spanish speakers produce more prominent object constructions because they have acquired the L2 processing strategies which include dislocated object (or other prominent object) syntactic frames for cases where the theme is a more salient entity than the agent. If this were the case, we would expect a gradual approach to native-like production patterns: progressively fewer passives and more prominent object constructions as proficiency increases. If that were the case, the pattern of active and passive production of the L2 speakers as a group should fall somewhere in between the patterns of the two native speaking populations indicating a progressive approach to the L2 processing modes. However, this is not what we see when we contrast the production pattern of the three speaker populations (see Fig. 2). Indeed, while the L2 Spanish speakers behave similarly to the native Spanish speakers regarding activepassive choice in the base condition when the agent is the salient entity (light bars), they are not behaving like the speakers of the target language when confronted with a salient theme (dark bars) and neither are they behaving like a hypothetical speaker approaching nativelike preferences. In short, with respect to the production of active and passive sentences, the L2 Spanish speakers are neither showing signs of L1 transfer (i.e., a sharp increase in passive production) nor behaving as if they had acquired or are acquiring the target language’s processing preferences (i.e., a production rate of passives falling in between the rates of the two native speaking populations). Given the electrophysiological evidence of fundamental differences in the processing of L2 grammatical features that are absent in the L1 even in highly proficient speakers (see for example, Chen and Su 2011; Dowens et al. 2010, 2011), including differences in canonical word order (Erdocia et al. 2013), it is indeed highly unlikely that these speakers would already have acquired native preferences for a structure that is not only not found in their L1 but also quite infrequent in their L2, and more so in the case of L2 Spanish speakers living in an English speaking country. Furthermore, non-canonical word orders seem to incur higher processing costs in native speakers (Erdocia et al. 2009; Matzke et al. 2002), which would make them even more difficult to produce if the L2 speaker cannot rely on native processing modes, an expectation clearly at odds with our data where the L2 speakers produce these alternative structures quite liberally as compared with L1 speakers. Therefore, it seems safe to assume that the increase in prominent object constructions in

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L2 Spanish is not simply the result of L2 speakers acquiring the native Spanish speaker associations between specific conceptual configurations and particular syntactic frames, but more likely the result of “filtering” the inherent modes of processing linguistic messages through a new target language that is still not fully mastered. Nevertheless, it is true that, on the basis of these data alone, it is not possible to completely rule out the alternative interpretation of L2 Spanish speakers’ behavior being the result of their having acquired associations specific to their L2 that would trigger the production of a prominent object construction rather than a passive under certain conceptual configurations. However, our results seem, for the reasons mentioned above, more notably, that the L2 speakers are not actually behaving like the native speakers, more compatible in principle with L2 Spanish speakers trying to accommodate the two general preferences and making use of the structures in the L2 that allow them to do so, rather than relying on a learned strategy to choose a passive construction when the theme is the most salient entity in the discourse. To the extent that this can be thought to be the case, it suggests that grammatical encoding proceeds without a pre-planned full syntactic frame chosen independently by the speaker in which the lexical units are inserted as they become available. In that case, it appears more likely that the syntactic frame is being built on the fly (or amended on the fly, see Brown-Schmidt and Tanenhaus 2006) to accommodate the lexical items that are ready to be produced at a particular point in time. As was the case with previous findings relating to the effects of animacy in different languages separately (Prat-Sala and Branigan 2000), these findings would thus be compatible with incremental models of language production which process information as it becomes available rather than waiting for all the components of a sentence to be ready before committing to a particular syntactic structure and a particular assignment of syntactic roles. Furthermore, it seems that it is word order that is most affected by salience (Branigan et al. 2008; Kohne et al. 2013). That is, what salience appears to do is make the affected constituent be processed earlier which, given the incrementality of language production, results in an earlier placement in the final sentence. Other features, such as thematic role, are more likely to be responsible for function assignment. Since incompatibilities may arise, the final form of the sentence will reflect the relative contributions and/or weights of the different factors at a particular time. At the same time, strict incrementality cannot be all there is to language production because such an account leaves a number of puzzles unexplained. For example, since there must be occasions in which lexical items become available at a point when they cannot be incorporated into the unfolding sentence, it must also be possible to buffer constituents until they can be included. In fact, evidence from syntactic priming (e.g., Bock et al. 1992; Pickering and Branigan 1998; Smith and Wheeldon 2001) shows that speakers can prepare the syntactic structure of a sentence independently of the lexical items it will contain. It is thus possible that there are differences in the amount of syntactic preplanning a speaker makes. Such differences may depend on the individual (Wagner et al. 2010), the specific circumstances under which a particular utterance is produced, or characteristics of the utterance itself (Wheeldon et al. 2013), including those related to the target language (Brown-Schmidt and Konopka 2008). This flexibility ensures that speakers of different languages take the most efficient route to the final utterance depending on the target language’s constraints and affordances (Jaeger and Norcliffe 2009). Finally, we should also bear in mind the probabilistic nature of the data both in this and in previous studies (e.g., 38 % actives vs. 62 % passives in Prat-Sala and Branigan 2000, Table 1, Exp. 2)—given a certain contextual configuration, speakers appear only more or less likely to make a certain syntactic choice. As pointed out in the Introduction, this could well be the result of our failure to perfectly control salience. After all, salience is a relative measure,

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not an all-or-none trait and, what’s more, it is not perfectly predictable. Additionally, as yet undiscovered factors not controlled for in these studies may be having an effect on speaker decisions. Until we find out and are able to control every possible influence on speaker choices (if we ever do!), we can only work comparing relative proportions. In the present case, even though, when confronted with a salient theme, Spanish speakers do not always opt for a prominent object construction, and neither do English speakers opt for a passive one, what is notable is that L2 Spanish speakers make liberal use of structures that are not part of their native language’s syntactic inventory and do so in a way that indicates their native production processes are compatible with these non-native syntactic choices, since L2 speakers easily abandon the native syntactic choice in favor of supposedly better solutions for the particular contextual configuration. In conclusion, when English speakers of L2 Spanish produce sentences in their L2 Spanish that need to accommodate salient themes, they behave neither like they would in their L1 (opting for passives) nor exactly like if they are approaching the L2 processing preferences. Instead, these L2 speakers seem to make use of the new syntactic options offered by their L2, namely word order variations that place the object in a more prominent position, in a way that suggests grammatical encoding depends on the outcome of weighing a number of preferences such as first-come-first-serve and make-themes-direct-objects rather than being the result of choosing a full syntactic structure to fit a particular conceptual configuration. Acknowledgments We would like to thank Merce Prat-Sala and Holly Branigan for making their materials available to us for use in this experiment.

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