Are There Really Syntactic Complexity Effects in Sentence Production? A Reply to Scontras et al. (2015)

SBSLF argue that “structures with non-local dependencies like the object-extraction in (1b) may be more costly to produce because one of the dependencies initiated by the pronoun ‘who’ needs to be maintained in memory while the intervening material (‘the senator’ in [1b]) is being uttered” (p. 562). This quote, plus the article title—“Syntactic complexity effects in sentence production”—invites the inference that SBSLF’s findings (longer initiation latencies and durations for object-extractions than subject-extractions) are syntactic complexity effects. However, SBSLF instead note some concerns with their studies and conclude that it “remains an open question” why their results obtained (p. 13). We think that SBSLF’s choice of comparison conditions, methods, and materials compromise interpretation of their results.