PRODUCTIVITY IN LANGUAGE PRODUCTION

Lexical statistics and a production experiment are used to gauge the e xtent to which the linguistic notion of morphological productivity is relevant for psycholinguistic theories of speech production in languag es such as Dutch and English. Lexical statistics of productivity show that despite the relatively poor morphology of Dutch, new words are cr eated often enough for the marginalisation of word formation in theori es of speech production to be theoretically unattractive. This conclus ion is supported by the results of a production experiment in which su bjects freely created hundreds of productive, but only a handful of un productive, neologisms. A tentative solution is proposed as to why the opposite pattern has been observed in the speech of jargonaphasics.