PROCESSING LANGUAGE PERFECTLY BUT NOT AUTOMATICALLY

Abstract

In this paper, we report the results of a preliminary study in which we explore the liming of productions of short noun phrases vs. word lists by native German speakers and advanced learners of German. The phrases/ word lists consisted of a noun preceded by two adjectives that appeared in either a more usual sequence or unusual (but grammatical) sequence. Participants were asked to either produce the words as a list or as a phrase (which required the adjectives to agree with the noun in number and gender. Although both group produced error-free utterances and showed similar response times to utter the lists, the native German speakers, but not the second language speakers, were significantly slowed by the unusual adjective order, but only when they were producing phrases.