EXPRESS: The role of animacy in language production: evidence from bare noun naming.

Abstract

According to Levelt's language production model, in order to name an object, speakers must first conceptualize and lexicalize the object before its name can be articulated. Conceptualization is conducted through the semantic network that exists at the conceptual level, with the highly activated concept(s) activating lexical items at the lemma-level, i.e., lexicalization. So far, research focused mostly on semantic categories (i.e., semantic interference) but less so on animacy - a concept that is correlated with semantic categories. To investigate the role of this semantic feature in language production, we conducted a picture-word interference study in Mandarin Chinese varying animacy congruency and controlling for classifier congruency while recording behavioral and electrophysiological responses. We observed an animacy interference effect together with a larger N400 component for animacy-incongruent vs. congruent picture-word pairs, suggesting animacy-congruent concepts may be in closer proximity and hence lead to a stronger spreading of activation relative to animacy-incongruent concepts. Furthermore, a larger P600 component was observed for classifier-incongruent vs. congruent picture-word pairs, suggesting syntactically-driven processing of classifiers at the lemma level.