Neuroscience Research 41 (2001) 293 – 298 www.elsevier.com/locate/neures Rapid Communication Electrophysiological estimates of semantic and syntactic information access during tacit picture naming and listening to words Bernadette M. Schmitt a,c, *, Antoni Rodriguez-Fornells b , Marta Kutas c , Thomas F. Mu ¨ nte b a Department of Neurocognition, Faculty of Psychology, Maastricht Uniersity, PO Box 616, 6200 MD Maastricht, The Netherlands b Department of Neuropsychology, Otto -on -Guericke -Uniersita ¨t Magdeburg, Magdeburg, Germany c Department of Cognitie Science and Department of Cognitie Neuroscience, Uniersity of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA Received 10 April 2001; accepted 3 August 2001 Abstract We investigated the relative time courses of the accessibility of semantic and syntactic information in speaking and comprehension via event-related brain potentials (ERPs). Native German speakers either viewed a series of pictures (tacit picture naming experiment) or heard a series of nouns (listening experiment) and made dual choice go/nogo decisions based on each item’s semantic and syntactic features. N200 peak latency results indicate that access to meaning has temporal precedence over access to syntactic information in both speaking ( 80 ms) and comprehension ( 70 ms), and are discussed in the context of current psycholinguistic theories. © 2001 Elsevier Science Ireland Ltd. and the Japan Neuroscience Society. All rights reserved. Keywords: ERP; N200; Language production; Language comprehension; Syntactic encoding; Semantic encoding Psycholinguists are interested in determining the na- ture and the time course of information processing during language comprehension and production. Within models of speech comprehension, going from the segregation of a speech sound to its meaning in- volves phonological encoding followed by syntactic and semantic integration (Cutler and Clifton, 1999). Elec- trophysiological data support such models with regard to the relative time course of access to phonological and semantic information (Bentin et al., 1999; Ro- driguez-Fornells et al., 2001). Within models of speech production, it is generally assumed that going from an idea to an utterance involves activation of conceptual, semantic, syntactic, and phonological knowledge (Lev- elt et al., 1999; Indefrey and Levelt, 2000). This pro- posal has received support from several studies using event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to track the time course of phonological versus semantic encoding (Van Turennout et al., 1997; Schmitt et al., 2000; Rodriguez- Fornells et al., 2001), conceptual versus syntactic en- coding (Schmitt et al., 2001), and syntactic versus phonological encoding (Van Turennout et al., 1998). Schmitt et al. (2001), for example, found earlier access to conceptual (estimating an object’s weight) than syntactic information (syntactic gender decision) during tacit naming. However, to date, ERPs have not been used to delineate the time courses of access to semantic (categorization) versus syntactic information during either noun generation or comprehension. Note that conceptual and semantic information differ in the sense that only the latter is linguistic (Bierwisch and Schreuder, 1992). We, therefore, undertook two ERP- experiments, one employing tacit picture naming and another employing a listening task, to fill in these gaps * Corresponding author. Tel.: +31-43-3882173; fax: +31-43- 3884125. E-mail address: b.schmitt@psychology.unimaas.nl (B.M. Schmitt). 0168-0102/01/$ - see front matter © 2001 Elsevier Science Ireland Ltd. and the Japan Neuroscience Society. All rights reserved. PII:S0168-0102(01)00286-3