Lexico-syntactic features are activated but not selected in bare noun production: Electrophysiological evidence from overt picture naming

Publication date: Available online 31 May 2018
Source:Cortex
Author(s): Man Wang, Yiya Chen, Niels O. Schiller
To produce a word, speakers need to retrieve the lexico-syntactic representation of the word and encode the phonological form for articulation. It is not precisely known yet if a word's syntactic features (e.g. number, gender, etc.) are automatically activated and selected in bare noun production. Cubelli and colleagues (2005) proposed that only in languages that have a complex morphological structure (e.g. Italian), the selection of grammatical gender is required. In languages with a relatively simpler morphological structure, the selection of grammatical gender is by-passed. Here, we investigated this issue further by employing a language with an extremely simple morphological structure, i.e. Mandarin Chinese. Using the picture-word interference paradigm, we manipulated the congruency of the lexico-syntactic classifier feature (comparable to grammatical gender) between the target picture and the superimposed distractor word. We measured participants' naming latencies and their electroencephalogram (EEG). As a result, relative to the classifier-congruent condition, classifier incongruency elicited a stronger N400 effect in the ERP analyses, suggesting the automatic activation of lexico-syntactic features in bare noun production. However, classifier congruency did not affect naming latencies, suggesting that the lexico-syntactic feature is not selected in bare noun naming when it is irrelevant for production.



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