Lexical insertion,inflection, and derivation: Creative processes in word production

This study examines the distinction between creative and noncreative behavior as applied to the production of words and sentences. Under one hypothesis words such as governor and government are stored as independent units and produced by rote, but under another these nouns are not produced as fully integrated units but are generated by rules for combining stems (govern) and affixes (-ment and -or). Analyses of German and English speech errors supported the generation-by-rule thesis and indicated that word stems, prefixes, and suffixes must be separately stored in the internal lexicon and marked as to syntactic function in combining with other word components. The data also suggested a three-stage model of lexical processes in the production of speech: a lexical insertion stage whereby abstract lexical formatives are called on or introduced into sentences by means of abstract syntactic and semantic features; a rule application stage whereby feature agreement rules are applied to the formative and then inflectional, derivational, and phonological rules are applied to derive the phonetic string; finally a serial output stage whereby the phonetic string is translated into serially ordered motor commands.This research was supported by NIMH Grant RO 19964 to Donald Mackay.