BRAIN ACTIVITY DURING SPEAKING - FROM SYNTAX TO PHONOLOGY IN 40 MILLISECONDS

In normal conversation, speakers translate thoughts into words at high speed. To enable this speed, the retrieval of distinct types of lingu istic knowledge has to be orchestrated with millisecond precision. The nature of this orchestration is still largely unknown. This report pr esents dynamic measures of the real-time activation of two basic types of linguistic knowledge, syntax and phonology. Electrophysiological d ata demonstrate that during noun-phrase production speakers retrieve t he syntactic gender of a noun before its abstract phonological propert ies. This two-step process operates at high speed: the data show that phonological information is already available 40 milliseconds after sy ntactic properties have been retrieved.