Separating hierarchical relations and word order in language production. In this paper we address the question whether hierarchical relations and word order can be separated in sentence production. The syntactic relation between the subject noun and the local noun is the same in the two experiments, but the linear position of the local noun is different. The distribution of agreement errors was similar in the two experiments. We argue that these data provide evidence for a stage in language production in which a syntactic structure is built prior to a stage in which words are assigned to their linear position.
Agreement is computed during the first stage.