Ulrich Schade

The processing of syntactic information during language production has up to now undergone little empirical examination. One exception is the establishment of subject-verb-agreement (e.g., Bock & Miller 1991). In the respective experimental paradigm, sentence beginnings (preambles) of varying syntactic complexity are presented auditorily to the subjects. The task of the subjects is to repeat and subsequently complete these preambles. In the present article, we present an experiment done within this paradigm in order to examine the processes underlying the production of relative clauses. The hypotheses that were tested in this experiment are generated from the local-connectionist model of language production proposed by Schade (1999). The model allows predictions with regard to (a) the cognitive processes involved in language production, (b) an occasionally occuring memory overload during language production, and ( c) the resulting errors in the overt responses of the subjects. The data of the experiment yielded the predicted error pattems (verb omissions and complete abortions of sentence production) as weil as some weil known phenomena regarding subject-verb-agreement.