Producing written noun phrases in French

This research compares the time-course of the written production of bare nouns to that of noun phrases. French adults named pictures of objects either using or not using determiners. Resulting pauses and writing rates were analyzed in relation to word-orthographic frequency, syllabic length, and phoneme-to-grapheme consistency at the end of words. More specifically, we showed that the noun production process begins as soon the determiner production is initiated (word frequency effect on latencies, length and consistency effects on determiner writing rate) and continued during the course of the noun production. When the determiner was absent, the management of writing was different: the writer slowed the production speed, probably in order to realize the lexeme processing that s/he could not do in the absence of the determiner production time. These results provided further evidence that some form of parallel processing occurs in written word production and led us to sketch the time-course of the noun spelling in written denomination of a noun phrase.