Semantic and syntactic forces in noun phrase production.

Abstract

Three experiments investigated semantic and syntactic effects in the production of phrases in Dutch. Bilingual participants were presented with English nouns and were asked to produce an adjective ϩ noun phrase in Dutch including the translation of the noun. In 2 experiments, the authors blocked items by either semantic category or grammatical gender. Participants performed the task slower when the target nouns were of the same semantic category than when they were from different categories and faster when the target nouns had the same gender than when they had different genders. In a final experiment, both manipulations were crossed. The authors replicated the results of the first 2 experiments, and no interaction was found. These findings suggest a feedforward flow of activation between lexico-semantic and lexico-syntactic information.Speaking involves the retrieval of lexical representations that correspond to our intentions and the development of a syntactically well-formed frame for the to-be-uttered sentence. The development of such a frame is, in part, guided by syntactic information specific to each word: for example, a word's grammatical category, the subcategorization requirements of verbs, and a noun's gender (for languages such as Dutch). The focus of this article is on the relationship between retrieving a lexical representation that specifies the meaning the speaker wants to convey and retrieving the associated lexico-syntactic information.Across languages, lexico-syntactic properties of words are often linked to lexico-semantic properties. For example, for grammatical class, the semantic distinction between objects, actions, and properties corresponds to a syntactic distinction between nouns, verbs, and adjectives. The semantic dimension of biological gender corresponds to the syntactic distinction between masculine and feminine nouns, and the semantic distinction between entities that can be counted and substances is captured by the syntactic distinction between count and mass nouns. The existence of such correspondencies between the semantic and the syntactic dimensions has been taken by some authors as indicating a conceptual foundation for the syntactic distinctions (e.g., Bates & MacWhinney, 1982;Langacker, 1987). However, these correspondencies between semantic and syntactic properties are limited, to an important extent. With respect to grammatical class, actions (e.g., "to bomb") can also be denoted by nouns (e.g., bombardment). In a number of languages, gender of nouns is not only a property of nouns referring to entities but also of nouns referring to objects and abstract entities for which there is no clear semantic correlate. And, cases exist, in English for example, in which the distinction between count and mass nouns does not reflect the semantic distinction between entities that can be counted and substances (e.g., abstract nouns such as opinion and knowledge). The different degree of correspondence between lexico-semantic and lexico-syntactic properties across languages and types ...

The production of pronominal clitics: Implications for theories of lexical access

“…One set of results concerns the putative existence of a gender priming effect (Jescheniak & Levelt, 1994;Vigliocco et al, 2002). However, these results either have not been replicated, as in the case of Jescheniak and Levelt's (1994) study (see van Berkum, 1996van Berkum, , 1997 or, as in the case of Vigliocco et al (2002), the design of the experiments cannot exclude alternative explanations.…”

“…However, there are two aspects of the experimental design employed by Vigliocco et al (2002) that complicate the interpretation of the study. In their experiments, the gender homogeneous and gender heterogeneous sets differed systematically not only in the way gender was distributed in each set, but also in other related variables: the type of morphological transformation carried out on the adjectives in each set and the size of the response set.…”

“…One approach has focused on demonstrating that the gender of a distractor word in a picture-word interference naming task affects the retrieval of the gender of the target word as revealed through the production of gender-marked words, such as determiners in Dutch (La Heij et al, 1998;Schriefers, 1993;. The other approach has focused on demonstrating that the gender node of the target word can be primed by its repeated activation and selection (Jescheniak & Levelt, 1994;Vigliocco, Lauer, Damian, & Levelt, 2002).…”

“…The second set of studies related to gender retrieval explored whether access to a noun's gender facilitates its retrieval in a subsequent trial, the so-called gender recency (or priming) effect (Jescheniak & Levelt, 1994;Vigliocco, Lauer, Damian, Levelt, 2002). Jescheniak and Levelt (1994) asked Dutch participants to perform a gender decision task upon the presentation of a picture: Participants pressed one button if the picture's name was a ''de-gender'' word and another button if it was a ''het-gender'' word.…”

When zebras become painted donkeys: Grammatical gender and semantic priming interact during picture integration in a spoken Spanish sentence

“…Researchers have used the gender of nouns to investigate word retrieval and word production (e.g., Akhutina, Kurgansky, Polinsky, & Bates, 1999;Bates, Devescovi, Hernandez, & Pizzamiglio, 1996;Bates, Devescovi, Pizzamiglio, Damico, & Hernandez, 1995;Bentrovato, Devescovi, D'Amico, & Bates, 1999;Bentrovato, Devescovi, D'Amico, Wicha, & Bates, 2003;Grosjean, Dommergues, Cornu, & Guillelmon, 1994;Jacobsen, 1999;van Berkum, 1997;Vigliocco & Franck, 1999;Vigliocco, Lauer, Damian, & Levelt, 2002;Vigliocco, Vinson, Indefrey, Levelt, & Hellwig, 2004;Vigliocco & Zilli, 1999), cohort activation in word recognition (e.g., Dahan, Swingley, Tanenhaus, & Magnuson, 2000), processing differences between pictures and words (e.g., Bowers, Vigliocco, Stadthagen-Gonzalez, & Vinson, 1999), the relative timing of syntactic and phonological processes during lexical access (e.g., Schmitt, Rodriguez-Fornells, Kutas, & Munte, 2001a;Schmitt, Schiltz, Zaake, Kutas, & Munte, 2001b;van Turennout, Hagoort, & Brown, 1998) and the interplay between discourse, semantic, and syntactic level processes (e.g., Brown, van Berkum, & Hagoort, 2000;Deutsch & Bentin, 2001;Deutsch, Bentin, & Katz, 1999;Gunter, Friederici, & Schriefers, 2000;Gunter, Stowe, & Mulder, 1997;Hagoort, 2003;van Berkum, Brown, & Hagoort, 1999;Wicha, 2002;Wicha, Bates, Moreno, & Kutas, 2000). Recent studies have also provided electrophysiological evidence for the brain's sensitivity to gender agreement during sentence comprehension (e.g., Brown et al, 2000;Demestre, Meltzer, Garcia-Albea, & Vigil, 1999;Deutsch & Bentin, 2001;…”