PhD student: Yanan Wang
Supervisors: Prof. Dr. Niels O. Schiller (LUCL) & Prof. Dr. Christian Dobel (Friedrich Schiller University Jena)
The production of spoken words can be seen as a three-stage process, among which lexical selection receives the most attention. There are still some controversies about the realization of lemma retrieval in this process, and grammatical gender can be used to explore lemma retrieval since it is a lexico-syntactic feature that is stored in the lemma level. Different from Indo-European languages, Mandarin Chinese does not have the grammatical gender but adopts a classifier system that is equivalent to the grammatical gender mechanism. In my study, Chinese verbal classifiers will be used to explore whether the selection of lexico-syntactic features is a competitive or automatic process in speech production.