Determiner selection in noun phrase production

In 3 experiments, native speakers of German named pictures of 1 or 2 objects by producing singular or plural noun phrases consisting of a definite gender-marked determiner and a noun. When singular and plural determiners differed (masculine and neuter gender), naming latencies were longer for plural utterances than for singular utterances. By contrast, when singular and plural determiners were identical (feminine gender), no such effect was obtained. When participants produced bare nouns, the Gender x Number interaction disappeared. This pattern indicates that during the production of plural definite-determiner noun phrases, singular and plural determiners compete for selection. The resulting constraints on number and gender processing in noun phrase production are discussed in the framework of models of language production.