Lexical access in the production of noun phrases

In order to encode an event or a thought into language, the speaker has to access words from the mental lexicon and order them according to the rules of syntax. The present study taps into these components of language production as they proceed in time. The utterances investigated were Dutch noun phrases with a prenominal adjective (e.g., het groene huis--the green house). The results of two picture--word interference experiments showed interference effects from semantically related noun distractors, extending findings from production of single words to the production of phrases. In addition, the syntactic format of the noun phrase had an influence on the size and the time course of the semantic interference effect. On the basis of the results of these two experiments, a working model of the processes involved in the production of noun phrases is proposed.