We report two experiments that suggest that syntactic category plays a key role in limiting competition in lexical access in speaking. We introduce a novel sentence-picture interference (SPI) paradigm, and we show that nouns (e.g., running as a noun) do not compete with verbs (e.g., walking as a verb) and verbs do not compete with nouns in sentence production, regardless of their conceptual similarity. Based on this finding, we argue that lexical competition in production is limited by syntactic category. We also suggest that even complex words containing category-changing derivational morphology can be stored and accessed together with their final syntactic category information. We discuss the potential underlying mechanism and how it may enable us to speak relatively fluently.

中文翻译：

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句法范畴限制了说话时的词汇竞争。

我们报告了两个实验，表明句法范畴在限制语言访问中的竞争中起着关键作用。我们介绍了一种新颖的句子图片干扰（SPI）范例，我们证明了名词（例如，作为名词运行）不会与动词（例如，以动词行走）竞争，并且动词在句子生成中不会与名词竞争，不论它们在概念上有何相似之处。基于这一发现，我们认为生产中的词汇竞争受到句法范畴的限制。我们还建议，甚至包含类别更改派生形态的复杂单词也可以与其最终句法类别信息一起存储和访问。我们讨论了潜在的潜在机制，以及它如何使我们能够相对流畅地讲话。