Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Does syntactic information affect the production of bare nouns?Research into this issue has explored word-specific features (e.g.,gender). However, word-independent syntactic distributions mayalso play a role. For example, studies of word recognition haveuncovered strong effects of the diversity of a word's syntacticdistribution – its syntactic flexibility – on response times in thelexical decision paradigm. By contrast, studies of sentenceproduction have produced strong but conflicted effects of syntacticflexibility. We propose that syntactic flexibility also affectsproduction of individual words. We reanalyze a database ofpreviously collected timed picture naming data using two novelmeasures of syntactic flexibility, one based on the relationsstemming from the noun, and one based on the relations extendingto the noun. Our results show that nouns that project a diversearray of structures are produced faster, and those that are integratedinto a diverse array of structures are produced slower.