Syntactic influences on lexical and morphological processing in language production

When one word replaces another in a speech error, the two welds predominant ly share syntactic category membership; this is the syntactic category cons traint. Stem exchanges like "trucked the park" appear to violate this const raint, implying either that morphological representations do not include sy ntactic category information (e.g., Garrett, 1975) or that syntactic catego ry member ship only softly constrains lexical errors (Stemberger, 1985). Fo ur experiments elicited exchanges with target phrases like "taped the recor d," in which the intended nouns sound different when used as nouns (REcord) or as verbs (reCORD). With such phrases, a stein exchange reveals whether the weld produced in verb stem position is a noun or verb. Against the pred ictions of standard accounts, in stem exchange errors, speakers predominant ly produced phrases like "reCORDed the tape," revealing that target nouns e rroneously produced in verb stem position were produced as verbs. The patte rn of results suggests that the processing of morphological representations is strongly influenced by syntactic information. (C) 2001 Academic Press.