Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Current theories of language production disagree about the way in which conceptual accessibility influences syntactic processing (e.g. Bock, 1987; De Smedt, 1990). We present theoretical arguments that the assumption of highly incremental processing can only be reconciled with theories in which conceptual accessibility influences word order. We report a sentence recall experiment in Modern Greek that provides empirical support for this position. Our results demonstrate that Greek speakers prefer to place conceptually accessible entities in early word order positions, irrespective of grammatical function, contrary to previous findings for English (Bock & Warren, 1985; McDonald, Bock & Kelly, 1993). We interpret our results as evidence for highly incremental processing.