Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Two experiments investigated the grammatical encoding processes during the production of noun phrases consisting of an article, an adjective, and a noun. Experiment 1 shows that for noun phrases in German, with the adjective in prenominal position, the lemmas of the noun and the adjective, and the noun's grammatical gender are selected before utterance onset. Experiment 2 shows that for noun phrases in French, with the adjective in postnominal position, only the noun lemma and its grammatical gender are selected. This suggests that grammatical advance planning at the level of grammatical encoding can operate with the smallest full phrase which can be expanded rightwards during articulation. Furthermore, the data show that gender is selected irrespective of whether it surfaces in the eventual phonological form of the noun phrase or not. This result is in line with the assumption that the grammatical encoder operates independently of the phonological encoder.