Lexical access in the production of pronouns

Speakers can use pronouns when their conceptual referents are accessible fr om the preceding discourse, as in 'The flower is red. It turns blue'. Theor ies of language production agree that in order to produce a noun semantic, syntactic, and phonological information must be accessed. However, little i s known about lexical access to pronouns. In this paper, we propose a model of pronoun access in German. Since the forms of German pronouns depend on the grammatical gender of the nouns they replace, the model claims that spe akers must access the syntactic representation of the replaced noun (its le mma) to select a pronoun. In two experiments using the lexical decision dur ing naming paradigm [Levelt, W.J.M., Schriefers, H., Vorberg, D., Meyer, A. S., Pechmann, T., Havinga, J., 1991a. The time course of lexical access in speech production: a study of picture naming. Psychological Review 98, 122- 142], we investigated whether lemma access automatically entails the activa tion of the corresponding word form or whether a word form is only activate d when the noun itself is produced, but not when it is replaced by a pronou n. Experiment 1 showed that during pronoun production the phonological form of the replaced noun is activated. Experiment 2 demonstrated that this pho nological activation was not a residual of the use of the noun in the prece ding sentence. Thus, when a pronoun is produced, the lemma and the phonolog ical form of the replaced noun become reactivated. (C) 1999 Elsevier Scienc e B.V. All rights reserved.