Electrophysiological estimates of semantic and syntactic information access during tacit picture naming and listening to words.

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 (approximately 80 ms) and comprehension (approximately 70 ms), and are discussed in the context of current psycholinguistic theories.