Two picture naming experiments show that compound word production in Mandarin Chinese and in English is determined by the compound's whole-word frequency, and not by its constituent morpheme frequency. Four control experiments rule out that these results are caused by recognition or articulatory processes. These results are consistent with models…

In three experiments we investigated the locus of the frequency effect in lexical access and the mechanism of gender feature selection. In Experiment 1, participants were asked to produce gender-marked verb plus pronominal clitic utterances in Italian (e.g., "portalo" (bring it [masculine]) in response to a written verb and pictured object. We…