Syntactic Influences on Lexical and Morphological Processing in Language Production

When one word replaces another in a speech error, the two words predominantly share syntactic category membership; this is the syntactic category constraint. Stem exchanges like “trucked the park” appear to violate this constraint, implying either that morphological representations do not include syntactic category information (e.g., Garrett, 1975) or that syntactic category membership only softly constrains lexical errors (Stemberger, 1985). Four experiments elicited exchanges with target phrases like “taped the record,” in which the intended nouns sound different when used as nouns (REcord) or as verbs (reCORD). With such phrases, a stem exchange reveals whether the word produced in verb stem position is a noun or verb. Against the predictions of standard accounts, in stem exchange errors, speakers predominantly produced phrases like “reCORDed the tape,” revealing that target nouns erroneously produced in verb stem position were produced as verbs. The pattern of results suggests that the processing of morphological representations is strongly influenced by syntactic information.