Brief article ªLong before shortº preference in the production of a head-®nal language Hiroko Yamashita * , Franklin Chang University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA Received 25 August 2000; accepted 16 February 2001 Abstract A tendency for speakers to produce short phrases before long phrases has been attributed to the accessibility of short phrases, and thought to re¯ect universal mechanisms of production. However, recent corpus analyses in Japanese suggest that long phrases tend to be shifted ahead of short ones (Hawkins, J. (1994). A performance theory of order and constituency. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Yamashita, in press). Two on-line experiments con®rmed that speakers shifted long arguments to earlier positions more than short arguments, exhibiting a ªlong before shortº preference. We reconcile these contradictory data from English and Japanese by a competition between different factors in an incremental production system. q 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Language production; Phrasal ordering; Scrambling; Japanese 1. ªShort before longº preference in English When people speak, a series of words must be produced in rapid succession. The speaker must access and sequence words within a phrase (i.e. put ªtheº before ªdogº), and furthermore sequence those phrases within a sentence (i.e. put ªthe dogº before ªon the streetº). Given the incredible ¯uency with which people produce sentences, it has been hypothesized that the language production system plans a sentence in an incremental manner, and that decisions about the sequencing of words and phrases depend on the accessibility of these units during the incre- H. Yamashita, F. Chang / Cognition 81 (2001) B45±B55 B45 Cognition 81 (2001) B45±B55 www.elsevier.com/locate/cognit 0010-0277/01/$ - see front matter q 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. PII: S0010-0277(01)00121-4 COGNITION * Corresponding author. 2090A FLB, 707 South Mathews, Urbana, IL 61801, USA. Fax: 11-217-244- 4010. E-mail address: hyamash@uiuc.edu (H. Yamashita).