Is the scope of phonological planning constrained by the syntactical role of the utterance constituents?

Five experiments looked the effect of repeated phonemes in the production of color adjective+noun phrases in English ("green gun"), or noun+color adjective phrases in Spanish and French. Whereas phoneme repetition sped up naming latencies in the case of prenominal color adjectives, it induced inhibition in the postnominal case. We argue that these dissociation is not compatible with a genuine crosslinguistic difference in the scope of phonological encoding. Rather we explain it in terms of the interplay between an activation gradient, coding word order, and an activation bias, coding the syntactical role of the utterance constituents