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Abstract:
Janssen and Barber (2012) reported two studies on the production of complex noun
phrases (Spanish and French noun-adjective and noun-noun
phrases). They found that production latencies depended only
on the frequencies of the phrases, but not on the frequencies of
the individual words. This pattern may be seen as evidence for
lexical storage of phrases and against the traditional “words &
rules” view of the representation of linguistic knowledge. We
will discuss a series of experiments on the production of Dutch
adjective-noun phrases. We replicated the phrase frequency
effect seen by Janssen and Barber, but also found a robust
effect of the frequency of the first word of the phrase. We argue
that the phrase frequency effect arises during the conceptual
preparation of the utterance and that the results are consistent
with the view that phrases are composed by combining
individual words, in line with the “words & rules” view.
