How to Plan a Phrase

There's some really cool work here by a colleague of mine, Shotamoma at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He asked people to describe pictures of different objects and animals with simple sentences. And he compared advanced planning for sentences like the pirate below the guitar is coughing and the pirate under the guitar is sinking. So basically the data show that you plan sink before, so youPlan sink before because sinking is kind of the event that determines the whole thing. It's kind of like the sinking happens to the pirate, right? And so you need to plan that before you start saying anything at all about the pirate.