The role of verbs in sentence production

Abstract

Data are from an experiment to investigate the role of verbs in sentence production. Experiment employed a simple sentence elicitation technique: 3 pictures (one of a person, one of an action, and one of an object) were displayed and formed the basis for the expected sentence that would consist of a subject (on the basis of the person image), verb (on the basis of the action image), and verbal modifier (on the basis of the object image). The images were presented in different temporal configurations to determine whether the time taken to start uttering the subject of a sentence was contingent on having access to information about the action that would determine verb selection. There were 6 possible orders of presentation: Person-Action-Object, Person-Object-Action, Action-Person-Object, Action-Object-Person, Object-Person-Action, Object-Action-Person. <br/> The experiment was implemented using EPrime v2. The excel file contains the merged output of EPrime, the transcribed elicited sentences, the measured onset times to different sentence constituents (and the latencies with respect to other fixed temporal sign posts such as item onset, or onset of the different images composing the item), and the coding of responses in terms of their validity.