The time course of recovery for grammatical category information during lexical processing for syntactic construction

In the experiments outlined in this article, the authors investigate lexical access processes in language production. In their earlier work, T. Pechmann and D. Zerbst (2002) reported evidence for grammatical category constraints in a picture-word interference task. Although grammatical category information was not activated when subjects produced bare noun descriptions of simple objects, a robust effect arose when the target word had to be embedded in a syntactic frame. The current experiments demonstrate that compilation of a simple noun phrase (NP) yields word class effects in picture-word interference experiments in the same time frame as that generally observed for semantic processing. Most significantly, the effect emerges both in German and English with very similar profiles. On these grounds, it is implausible that the effect depends on syntactic gender activation, because such constraints are lacking in the English language version of the experiments.