In Experiments 1 and 2, the subjects completed a subject-deleted, verb-deleted, or complement deleted sentence by inspecting an accompanying picture. In Experiments 3 and 4, two (subjectand verb, verb and complement, or subjects and complement) or all sentence constitutents were deleted, and the subjects completed a fragmentary sentence also by inspecting an accompanying picture. In Experiment 5, an artifical sentence of the form. Verb (Subject, Complement), was introduced, and two or all sentence constituents were deleted for the subjects to fill in the appropiate ones. Three important variables of sentence production were identified: stimulus code ability, stimulus decoding, and output order. The factor of output order was found to be more important than the phrase structure in determining the sentence-completion times.