Determiner competition in the production of noun phrases

Katharina Spalek and Herbert Schriefers
NICI, Nijmegen University

We showed that if different morphosyntactic forms of a word (singular / plural, baseform / diminutive) require different determiners, then the determiners compete when speakers produce the ‘non-default’ form with its determiner. This competition is modulated by the relative dominance / frequency of the morphosyntactic forms.

In several picture naming experiments we exploited certain properties of the grammatical gender and determiner system of German and Dutch: German has three definite determiners for the singular: ‘der’ (masculine), ‘die’ (feminine), and ‘das’ (neuter gender). In the plural there is only one determiner, ‘die’. Dutch has two definite singular determiners, ‘de’ (common gender) and ‘het’ (neuter), but only one plural determiner (‘de’).

The experiments in German show that definite plural noun phrases are produced more slowly than corresponding singular noun phrases for masculine and neuter nouns, while no plural cost is obtained for feminine nouns (Schriefers, Jescheniak, & Hantsch, in press). These results indicate that during the production of plural noun phrases the singular and plural determiners of masculine and neuter nouns compete for selection with the plural determiner ‘die’ (see also Janssen and Caramazza, submitted).

In a second experiment, we investigated the production of diminutive and baseforms in Dutch. A diminutive has always neuter gender and thus demands the determiner ‘het’, irrespective of the baseform’s gender: ‘de laars’ (the boot) and ‘het huis’ (the house) both take ‘het’ when used in their diminutive forms ‘het laarsje’ and ‘het huisje’. >From a calibration study, we chose baseform dominant nouns and diminutive dominant nouns for a picture naming experiment. In the main experiment, participants produced definite noun phrases with nouns either in the baseform or in the diminutive form. For baseform dominant de-words in the diminutive (e.g. ‘het pindatje’, the little peanut) we found a reaction time cost relative to the noun phrase with a baseform (e.g. ‘de pinda’). For nouns with baseforms of neuter gender (het-words), baseform noun phrases (e.g. ‘het geweer’, the gun) and diminutive noun phrases (‘het geweertje’) were produced equally fast (see also Janssen and Caramazza, submitted). This suggests that when producing a diminutive, the determiner of its baseform becomes also activated, thus leading to competition in the case of common gender baseforms. This type of competition did not occur for the group of diminutive dominant nouns, indicating that the relative frequency of diminutive and baseform affects the competition that occurs between the baseform’s and the diminutive’s determiner.

References

Janssen, N., & Caramazza, A. (submitted). The selection of closed-class words in noun-phrase production: the case of Dutch determiners.

Schriefers, H., Jescheniak, J., & Hantsch, A. (in press). Determiner selection in noun phrase production. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition.