A series of three experiments investigated semantic and syntactic effects in the production of Adjective+Noun phrases in Dutch. Bilinguals (Dutch native speakers) were presented with English nouns and were asked to produce an Adjective+Noun phrase in Dutch which included the translation of the noun. In two experiments, we blocked items by either semantic category or grammatical gender.We found that 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 they were of the same grammatical gender than when they were of different gender. In a final experiment, both manipulations were crossed in order to both replicate the previous experiments and to test for interactions between the two effects. The results of the first two experiments were replicated, and crucially no interaction was found. These findings are compatible with models of lexical retrieval in production in which, first lexico-semantic and lexico-syntactic information are separable; second the flow of activation between the two is feedforward.

The study investigated the neuronal basis of the retrieval of words from the mental lexicon. The semantic category interference effect was used to locate lexical retrieval processes in time and space. This effect reflects the finding that, for overt naming, volunteers are slower when naming pictures out of a sequence of items from the same semantic category than from different categories. Participants named pictures blockwise either in the context of same- or mixedcategory items while the brain response was registered using magnetoencephalography (MEG). Fifteen out of 20 participants showed longer response latencies in the same-category compared to the mixed-category condition. Event-related MEG signals for the participants demonstrating the interference effect were submitted to a current source density (CSD) analysis. As a new approach, a principal component analysis was applied to decompose the grand average CSD distribution into spatial subcomponents (factors). The spatial factor indicating left temporal activity revealed significantly different activation for the same-category compared to the mixedcategory condition in the time window between 150 and 225 msec post picture onset. These findings indicate a major involvement of the left temporal cortex in the semantic interference effect. As this effect has been shown to take place at the level of lexical selection, the data suggest that the left temporal cortex supports processes of lexical retrieval during production. &

Abstract. This paper reviews current psycholinguistic and neuroimaging evidence on language processing with particular focus on the relationship between production and comprehension. In the first part, different methods of psycholinguistic research are introduced and examples for psycholinguistic

In numerous languages determiner forms depend not only on semantic information but also on several other kinds of information, such as the grammatical gender of the controlling noun or the phonological properties of the context. In the present research we contrasted two possible accounts of determiner retrieval: one in which every type of required information is bundled into a unitized representation for determiner retrieval and one in which each type of information can individually activate determiner forms. These alternative hypotheses were investigated in three experiments in which native speakers of French named pictures with simple [determiner + noun] or complex [determiner + adjective + noun] noun phrases. In the experiments, the properties of the contextual cues that drive the retrieval of the determiner were manipulated for example, we manipulated the number of determiner forms that are compatible with a given grammatical gender and the number of grammatical genders that a given determiner form can be used with. Neither hypothesis can fully account for the results of the three experiments. However, a hybrid hypothesis that combines the principal features of the two hypotheses provides a good account of the data. - 3 - Speaking involves the retrieval of different types of lexical items, and their organization into well formed utterances. Descriptively, two categories of lexical items are distinguished: the closed class and the open class. Closed-class items are the bound and the freestanding grammatical morphemes (suffixes, prepositions, determiners, auxiliary verbs, etc.). Open-class items are the content words (nouns, adjectives, verbs, and some adverbs). A distinguishing feature of the closed-class set is that its membership is more or less fixed; speakers ...

Introduction One of the premises of contemporary cognitive science is that an organism's response to a stimulus requires sensory, perceptual, and memory processes on an order of complexity unexpected from observations of simple reactions to physical stimulation. It was a touchstone of the cognitive revolution in the late 1950s and early 1960s that these interpretative processes are a proper subject for psychology, setting the goal of explaining how a stimulus is processed through successive mental transformations. In contrast, within behaviorist conceptions that regarded the relationships between stimuli and responses as little more than learned reflexes (Skinner, 1953; Watson, 1913), the role that mental transformations played was on a par with the hyphen in the term stimulusresponse (S-R) psychology. Put into the terms of the theoretical framework that cognitive psychology supplanted, the thrust of the cognitive revolution was therefore directed toward elaborating the S of S

This study explored access to grammatical gender during naming in Hebrew. Studies of anomia and tip-of-the-tongue states (TOT) found that speakers of various languages (Italian, Spanish, German, Dutch) have information about the grammatical gender of words they fail to retrieve. In Hebrew, on the other hand, a TOT study found that Hebrew speakers could not provide gender information. To test access to gender in single words in Hebrew we used an implicit measure -- the analysis of paraphasias of anomic patients with respect to whether or not they preserved the grammatical gender of the target word. The rationale behind this measure was that when a paraphasia is created, it generally conforms to the partial knowledge the speaker has on the target word. If speakers have gender knowledge when they fail to name, they should produce paraphasias that match their partial information, and thus match the gender of the target. Such gender preservation in paraphasias was found in German for individuals with anomia, and in Arabic, French and German for slips-of-thetongue.

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Fluid Construction Grammar (FCG) is a formalism for defining the inventory of lexical and grammatical conventions that language processing requires and the operations with which this inventory is used to parse and produce sentences. This chapter introduces some of the key ideas and basic design principles behind the development of Fluid Construction Grammar. 1. Background Fluid Construction Grammar (FCG) is designed primarily to allow computational linguists to formally write down the inventory of lexical and grammatical constructions needed in parsing or producing utterances or do experiments in language learning and language evolution. A computational formalism is necessarily based on a particular perspective on language. For FCG, this perspective is inspired by research into cognitive linguistics in general and construction grammar in particular. FCG is not intended to displace existing linguistic proposals for construction