In a sentence like Who does the artist think chased the chef?, the who at the beginning depends on the last bit of the sentence, chased the chef. This is an instance of a long-distance dependency. What is the nature of the cognitive process that allows speakers to produce sentences that include distant elements that form dependencies? In four experiments, speakers described drawings that elicited long-distance dependencies. Critically, speakers were sometimes primed to produce a that in sentences where that was ungrammatical due to a grammatical constraint known as the that-trace constraint (e.g.,*Who does the artist think that chased the chef). Results showed that, when primed to say an ungrammatical that, speakers were slower to start to speak. Because the that-trace constraint applies selectively to certain configurations of long-distance dependencies, this suggests that the grammatical details of the long-distance dependency are already planned before speakers start to speak the sentences involving long-distance dependencies. I propose a formal model that explains how speakers plan long-distance dependencies in advance of speaking them while also managing the cognitive pressure to speak sentences incrementally.

像艺术家认为谁追逐厨师这样的句子？，开头的谁靠最后一句，追了厨师。这是一个实例长-距离的关系。允许说话者产生包含形成依赖关系的遥远元素的句子的认知过程的本质是什么？在四个实验中，发言者描述了引起长距离依赖的图画。重要的是，扬声器有时致敏以产生该句子，其中该是被称为语法约束不通由于该-trace约束（例如，*艺术家认为谁追了厨师）。结果表明，当准备好说一个不符合语法的that 时，说话者开始说话的速度较慢。因为that -trace 约束选择性地应用于某些长距离依赖的配置，这表明长距离依赖的语法细节在说话者开始说出涉及长距离依赖的句子之前就已经计划好了。我提出了一个正式模型，它解释了说话者如何在说话之前计划长距离依赖关系，同时还管理逐步说出句子的认知压力。