Producing Less Preferred Structures: More Gestures, Less Fluency

Speakers often have choices about how to structure their utterances. However, even though multiple alternatives may be acceptable in theory, often one of them will be preferred over the others. The question we explored here was what happens when speakers produce less preferred alternatives. We developed a new experimental paradigm to reliably elicit the propositional or double object dative with varying degrees of preference. We then used this paradigm to investigate how, given properties of the message, an individual speaker's preference for a particular structure affects how that utterance is produced. Speakers gestured more and were more likely to be disfluent when they chose less preferred structures. Thus, having a choice per se does not guarantee more successful production. Instead, production is facilitated when speakers choose more preferred alternatives.