Sentence Planning in a Story Continuation Task

Subjects were asked to give brief continuations to short stories about everyday events. Voice initiation times as well as pauses and disruptions within utterances were recorded. The results for the voice initiation times indicated that advance planning of the whole utterance occurred, whether it was one sentence or more than one. While the number of finite (surface) clauses added to planning time, the number of basic (deep) clauses did not. Probability of pausing during the output was highest at sentence boundaries, and finite clauses were preceded by pauses more often than basic clauses. Since the probability of pausing was determined largely by the degree of linguistic integration of the succeeding unit with the preceding one, the pauses appeared to have primarily a rhetorical rather than a planning function. In demonstrating considerable pre-planning and the importance of the finite clause, the results differed from those obtained in spontaneous speech situations, presumably because of the reduced cognitive and semantic processing load.