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Syntactic category constrains lexical competition in speaking.
Shota Momma1, Julia Buffinton2, L Robert Slevc2
1University of Massachusetts, Amherst, United States of America.
Cognition
|January 27, 2020
Summary
Syntactic category limits word competition during speech production. Nouns and verbs do not interfere with each other, even when conceptually similar, aiding fluent speaking.
Area of Science:
- Psycholinguistics
- Cognitive Science
- Linguistics
Background:
- Lexical access during speech production involves selecting words.
- Competition between words is a key aspect of lexical access.
- The role of syntactic category in limiting this competition is not fully understood.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the role of syntactic category in limiting lexical competition during spoken word production.
- To determine if nouns compete with verbs, and vice versa, in sentence production.
- To explore how syntactic category information is stored and accessed for complex words.
Main Methods:
- Utilized a novel sentence-picture interference (SPI) paradigm.
- Conducted two experiments manipulating syntactic categories (nouns and verbs).
- Assessed competition between words irrespective of their conceptual similarity.
Main Results:
- Nouns did not compete with verbs in sentence production.
- Verbs did not compete with nouns, regardless of conceptual similarity.
- This suggests syntactic category plays a crucial role in limiting lexical competition.
Conclusions:
- Lexical competition in speech production is constrained by syntactic category.
- Complex words with derivational morphology are accessed with their final syntactic category.
- This mechanism likely contributes to fluent speech production.
Keywords:
Grammatical encodingLexical accessSentence picture interferenceSentence productionSyntactic categoryMore Related Videos
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