Phonological facilitation of grammatical gender retrieval

In Dutch, the gender of nouns is marked by the definite articles de (common gender) and het (neuter gender). Most models of language production assume that gender information is retrieved via the noun's syntactic representation (or lemma). The authors test Caramazza's (1997) alternative proposal, according to which gender information is retrieved via the noun's phonological word form (or lexeme). In three picture-word experiments, which differed in the tasks to be performed (noun production, article+noun production, article production, and gender decision), clear phonological effects were obtained in tasks involving the retrieval of the noun's gender information. It is argued that traditional models of language production have difficulty in accounting for the occurrence and/or the size of these effects whereas they follow quite naturally from Caramazza's (1997) Independent Network model.

[1]  A Caramazza,et al.  The selection of determiners in noun phrase production. , 1999, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition.

[2]  D. Mackay.  The Organization of Perception and Action , 1987 .

[3]  K. Rayner,et al.  Visual.vs. phonemic contributions to the importance of the initial letter in word identification , 1978 .

[4]  Pienie Zwitserlood.  Access to phonological-form representations in language comprehension and production. , 1994 .

[5]  A Caramazza,et al.  More is not always better : a response to Roelofs , Meyer , and , 1998 .

[6]  K Rayner,et al.  Graphemic and semantic similarity effects in the picture-word interference task. , 1986, British journal of psychology.

[7]  Wido La Heij,et al.  THE LOCUS OF ORTHOGRAPHIC-PHONOLOGICAL FACILITATION : REPLY TO ROELOFS, MEYER, AND LEVELT (1996) , 1996 .

[8]  K. Rayner,et al.  Visual-feature and response components in a picture-word interference task with beginning and skilled readers. , 1977, Journal of experimental child psychology.

[9]  J J van Berkum,et al.  Syntactic processes in speech production: the retrieval of grammatical gender. , 1997, Cognition.

[10]  J. Jescheniak,et al.  Utterance format affects phonological priming in the picture-word task: implications for models of phonological encoding in speech production. , 2003, Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance.

[11]  Walter Schneider,et al.  Micro Experimental Laboratory: An integrated system for IBM PC compatibles , 1988 .

[12]  Albert Costa,et al.  The Gender Congruity Effect: Evidence from Spanish and Catalan , 1999 .

[13]  H Schriefers,et al.  Grammatical gender in noun phrase production: the gender interference effect in German. , 2000, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition.

[14]  M Turennout,et al.  Brain activity during speaking: from syntax to phonology in 40 milliseconds. , 1998, Science.

[15]  W. Levelt,et al.  Interaction between semantic and orthographic factors in conceptually driven naming: Comment on Starreveld and La Heij (1995) , 1996 .

[16]  A. Caramazza.  How many levels of processing are there in lexical access , 1997 .

[17]  Alfonso Caramazza,et al.  The relation between syntactic and phonological knowledge in lexical access: evidence from the `tip-of-the-tongue' phenomenon , 1997, Cognition.

[18]  D. Wahlsten.  Sample Size to Detect a Planned Contrast and a One Degree-of-Freedom Interaction Effect , 1991 .

[19]  M. F. Garrett,et al.  The Analysis of Sentence Production1 , 1975 .

[20]  G. A. Miller.  THE PSYCHOLOGICAL REVIEW THE MAGICAL NUMBER SEVEN, PLUS OR MINUS TWO: SOME LIMITS ON OUR CAPACITY FOR PROCESSING INFORMATION 1 , 1956 .

[21]  H. Schriefers.  Syntactic processes in the production of noun phrases , 1993 .

[22]  Peter A. Starreveld,et al.  On the Interpretation of Onsets of Auditory Context Effects in Word Production , 2000 .

[23]  Herbert Schriefers,et al.  Representation and Processing of Grammatical Gender in Language Production: A Review , 1999 .

[24]  Herbert Schriefers,et al.  Determiner selection in noun phrase production. , 2002, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition.

[25]  P. Starreveld,et al.  Time-course analysis of semantic and orthographic context effects in picture naming. , 1996 .

[26]  M. Kalish,et al.  Decontextualised data IN, decontextualised theory OUT , 1999, Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

[27]  W. La Heij,et al.  The gender-congruency effect in picture-word tasks , 1998 .

[28]  Antje S. Meyer,et al.  Multiple perspectives on word production , 1999, Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

[29]  Trevor A. Harley,et al.  Phonological activation of semantic competitors during lexical access in speech production , 1993 .

[30]  Antje S Meyer,et al.  Specific-word frequency is not all that counts in speech production: comments on Caramazza, Costa, et al. (2001) and new experimental data. , 2003, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition.

[31]  A Caramazza,et al.  The specific-word frequency effect: implications for the representation of homophones in speech production. , 2001, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition.

[32]  J G Snodgrass,et al.  Picture naming by young children: norms for name agreement, familiarity, and visual complexity. , 1997, Journal of experimental child psychology.

[33]  Wido La Heij,et al.  Semantic interference, orthographic facilitation, and their interaction in naming tasks. , 1995 .

[34]  Alfonso Caramazza,et al.  The production of determiners: evidence from French , 2002, Cognition.

[35]  Albert Costa,et al.  What determines the speed of lexical access: homophone or specific-word frequency? A reply to Jescheniak et al. (2003). , 2004, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition.

[36]  Van Berkum,et al.  The psycholinguistics of grammatical gender: studies in language comprehension and production , 1996 .

[37]  A. Caramazza,et al.  Grammatical feature selection in noun phrase production: Evidence from German and Dutch , 2003 .

[38]  G S Dell,et al.  A spreading-activation theory of retrieval in sentence production. , 1986, Psychological review.

[39]  H. Schriefers,et al.  Phonological facilitation in picture-word interference experiments: Effects of stimulus onset asynchrony and types of interfering stimuli. , 1991 .

[40]  Michele Miozzo,et al.  Lexical access in speech production , 2000 .

[41]  H. Schriefers.  Phonological Facilitation in the Production of Two-word Utterances , 1999 .

[42]  Richard Schweickert,et al.  A critical path generalization of the additive factor method: Analysis of a stroop task , 1978 .

[43]  Antje S. Meyer,et al.  Exploring the time course of lexical access in language production : Picture word interference studies , 1990 .

[44]  K Rayner,et al.  Stages of processing in word identification. , 1978, Journal of experimental psychology. General.

[45]  W J Levelt,et al.  A case for the lemma/lexeme distinction in models of speaking: comment on Caramazza and Miozzo (1997) , 1998, Cognition.

[46]  P. Starreveld,et al.  What about phonological facilitation, response-set membership, and phonological coactivation? , 1999, Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

[47]  David Sohn.  The interaction concept in scientific discourse and in the analysis of variance , 1991 .

[48]  A. Meyer.  Lexical Access in Phrase and Sentence Production: Results from Picture–Word Interference Experiments , 1996 .

[49]  Willem J. M. Levelt,et al.  A theory of lexical access in speech production , 1999, Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

[50]  G. Dell,et al.  Lexical access in aphasic and nonaphasic speakers. , 1997, Psychological review.

[51]  Donald G. MacKay,et al.  The organization of perception and action. A theory for language and other cognitive skills , 1987, The Italian Journal of Neurological Sciences.

[52]  J. Fodor.  The Modularity of mind. An essay on faculty psychology , 1986 .

[53]  P. Briggs,et al.  Phonological coding in good and poor readers. , 1982, Journal of experimental child psychology.