Is the Scope of Phonological Planning Constrained by the Syntactic Role of the Utterance Constituents?

Five experiments looked at the effect of repeated phonemes in the production of colour adjective+noun phrases in English (“green gun”), or noun+colour adjective phrases in Spanish and French. Whereas phoneme repetition sped up naming latencies in the case of prenominal colour adjectives, it induced either no effect or inhibition in the postnominal case. We argue that this dissociation does not reflect a genuine cross-linguistic difference in the scope of phonological planning. Rather, we explain it in terms of the interplay between an activation gradient, coding word order, and an activation bias, coding the syntactic role of the utterance constituents.