Illuminating speech production

Abstract

During speaking we must access a repository containing knowledge of the meaning of words (word classes) and their phonological characteristics (phonemes and syllabic structure). This store is known as the mental lexicon and is accessed automatically at very high speeds to provide the appropriate word that conveys the intended meaning as well as its syntactic and phonological properties. Neuropsychological and behavioural evidence suggests that the semantic and syntactic meaning of a word is accessed before the phonological information. Miranda van Turennout and colleagues[1xBrain activity during speaking: from syntax to phonology in 40 milliseconds. van Turennout, M., Hagoort, P., and Brown, C.M. Science. 1998; 280: 572–574CrossRef | PubMed | Scopus (143)See all References][1]have now provided direct evidence, using a complex but elegant event-related potential paradigm, that the syntactic gender of a noun is obtained approximately 40 ms earlier than phonological information. The novel approach described by the authors provides a new insight into the temporal orchestration of linguistic information that is a prerequisite for speech production.