A search for inflectional priming reveals an effect of discourse type on the lexical access of inflected verbs

Abstract

A cross-modal priming experiment was conducted to test the hypothesis that lexical access of verbs marked with a specific inflectional suffix would be facilitated by immediately prior exposure to semantically and contextually unrelated verbs with the same suffix. It was hypothesized that while listening to spoken -ed sentences, subjects would respond more quickly to target words in the -ed form than in the -s or bare root form. Subjects were 15 university students, all native speakers of English, who responded to 60 visually presented target words, all based on one-syllable verb roots, while listening to aurally presented sentences of two types, one with and one without -ed verb morphology to provide a past tense environment. The predicted priming did not occur. Instead, bare root forms showed an absolute advantage over inflected forms in this experimental paradigm. However, an unanticipated finding was that responses to inflected forms were affected by the kind of discourse that was being attended to auditorily at the time of the visual lexical decision. There was no such effect of discourse context on responses on uninflected verbs. Results lend some support to the view that inflection triggers discourse integration. Contains 37 references. (MSE) *********************************************************************** Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document. A Search for Inflectional Priming Reveals an Effect of Discourse Type on the Lexical Access of Inflected Verbs PERMISSION TO REPRODUCE AND DISSEMINATE THIS MATERIAL HAS BEEN GRANTED BY