Distinguishing language from thought: Experimental evidence that syntax islexically rather than conceptually represented

It is generally assumed that syntax is represented linguistically rather th an conceptually, consistent with the move general view that language and th ought are coded separately This claim is widely defended on? logical ground s, but it has received little experimental support. in the present study, w e asked Spanish and English speakers to make semantic and syntactic categor izations Sor pictures and their corresponding names. Consistent with past r esults, latencies to semantically categorize pictures and words were simila r The new finding is that participants were faster to make syntactic decisi ons for words compared with pictures, suggesting that syntactic features su ch as grammatical gender and the count-mass distinction are more closely li nked to lexical than conceptual representations.