Selection of gender-marked morphemes in speech production

N.O. Schiller and A. Caramazza (2003) and A. Costa, D. Kovacic, E. Fedorenko, and A. Caramazza (2003) have argued that the processing of freestanding gender-marked morphemes (e.g., determiners) and bound gender-marked morphemes (e.g., adjective suffixes) during syntactic encoding in speech production follows distinct principles, with only freestanding morphemes being subject to a competitive selection process. In 3 experiments, the authors tested this hypothesis in German, extending a previous study by H. Schriefers, J.D. Jescheniak, and A. Hantsch (2002). The results suggest that freestanding and bound morphemes are basically processed in the same way, although competition appears to be attenuated for bound morphemes relative to free morphemes. The authors discuss theoretical and methodological implications of this pattern.