An electrophysiological analysis of the time course of conceptual and syntactic encoding during tacit picture naming

A central question in psycholinguistic research is when various types of in formation involved in speaking (conceptual/semantic, syntactic, and phonolo gical information) become available during the speech planning process. Com peting theories attempt to distinguish between parallel and serial models. Here, we investigated the relative time courses of conceptual and syntactic encoding in a tacit picture-naming task via event-related brain potential (ERP) recordings. Participants viewed pictures and made dual-choice go/no-g o decisions based on conceptual features (whether the depicted item was hea vier or lighter than 500 g) and syntactic features (whether the picture's G erman name had feminine or masculine syntactic gender). In support of seria l models of speech production, both the lateralized readiness potential, or LRP (related to response preparation), and the N200 (related to response i nhibition) measures indicated that conceptual processing began approximatel y 80 msec earlier than syntactic processing.