Sentence completion latencies as a function of constituent structure

Previous experiments have shown that if a sentence is fragmented by removing either the first or the second half of the sentence, Ss experience more difficulty in reconstructing sentences when the first half is missing than when the second half is missing. In the present experiment, an attempt was made to analyze the relationship between the number of constituents damaged by the fragmenting of the sentence and the time required to complete the sentence. It was shown that the number of damaged constituents predicted difficulty if the first half of the sentence had been deleted, but not if the second half had been deleted. This result was interpreted as being consistent with the view that the sentence producing device is equivalent to the left-to-right sentence generator described by Yngve (1960).