The mechanisms of determiner selection and its relation to lexical selection: An ERP study

Abstract

The language production literature has given only little attention to the dynamics of closed class word selection, such as determiner selection, and its temporal relation to the selection of open class words. The goal of this paper was to investigate whether determiner selection follows serially after lexical selection, or whether there is cascading. If there is cascading, the additional goal was to determine whether the selection of the correct determiner involves a competitive process. A go-nogo picture–word interference task was therefore performed in which gender congruency and categorical relation between distractor and target was manipulated and EEG was recorded. The ERP analysis showed that categorical relatedness helped determiner selection on gender congruent trials, but hindered on incongruent trials. This indicates that lexical selection and determiner selection overlap in time, and suggest that determiner selection is a competitive process.