Brief article A purple giraffe is faster than a purple elephant: Inconsistent phonology affects determiner selection in English Katharina Spalek a, * , Kathryn Bock b , Herbert Schriefers c a Department of German Language and Linguistics, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, 10099 Berlin, Germany b Beckman Institute, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 405 N. Mathews Ave, Urbana, IL 61801, USA c Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behavior, Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands article info Article history: Received 29 April 2009 Revised 18 September 2009 Accepted 21 September 2009 Keywords: Speech production Determiner competition Phonological consistency abstract The form of a determiner is dependent on different contextual factors: in some languages grammatical number and grammatical gender determine the choice of a determiner vari- ant. In other languages, the phonological onset of the element immediately following the determiner affects selection, too. Previous work has shown that the activation of opposing determiner forms by a noun’s grammatical properties leads to slower naming latencies in a picture naming task, as does the activation of opposing forms by the interaction between a noun’s gender and the phonological context. The present paper addresses the question of whether phonological context alone is sufficient to evoke competition between determiner forms. Participants produced English phrases in which a noun phrase’s phonology required a determiner that was the same as or differed from the determiner required by the noun itself (e.g., a purple giraffe; an orange giraffe). Naming latencies were slower when the phrase-initial determiner differed from the determiner required by the noun in isolation than when the phrase-initial determiner matched the isolated-noun determiner. This was true both for definite and indefinite determiners. The data show that during the pro- duction of a determiner–noun phrase, nouns automatically activate the phonological forms of their determiners, which can compete with the phonological forms that are generated by an assimilation rule. Ó 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Producing a noun phrase depends on some of the basic grammatical encoding processes that occur in sentence formulation. For example, using a singular noun phrase with a definite determiner in German or Dutch requires the retrieval of the noun’s grammatical gender along with the selection of the determiner itself. To accommodate dif- ferences in grammatical gender, German speakers have to select among der, die, or das to produce definite singular noun phrases; Dutch speakers have to choose between de and het in the same circumstances. In the plural, by con- trast, the same definite determiner is used regardless of gender class (die in German and de in Dutch). Capitalizing on the interesting complexities of definite- determiner selection in Dutch and German, a number of studies have contrasted the production of singular and plu- ral definite noun phrases (Janssen & Caramazza, 2003; Lemhöfer, Schriefers, & Jescheniak, 2006; Miozzo & Caram- azza, 1999; Schriefers, Jescheniak, & Hantsch, 2002, 2005; Spalek & Schriefers, 2005). These studies have consistently shown prolonged naming latencies for plural noun phrases in which the underlying singular determiner differed from the produced plural determiner (e.g., singular het paard [the horse]; plural de paarden [the horses] in Dutch), rela- tive to plural noun phrases in which the underlying singu- lar determiner was the same as the produced plural 0010-0277/$ - see front matter Ó 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2009.09.011 * Corresponding author. Address: Department of German Language and Linguistics, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Unter den Linden 6, 10099 Berlin, Germany. Tel.: +49 (30) 2093 9642; fax: +49 (30) 2093 9729. E-mail address: katharina.spalek@staff.hu-berlin.de (K. Spalek). Cognition 114 (2010) 123–128 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Cognition journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/COGNIT