Effects of sentence constraint on priming in natural language comprehension.

Abstract

In 4 cross-modal naming experiments, researchers investigated the role of sentence constraint in natural language comprehension. On the sentence constraint account, incoming linguistic material activates semantic features that in turn pre-activate likely upcoming words. The 1st and 2nd experiments investigated whether stimulus offset asynchrony played a critical role in previous studies supporting the sentence constraint account. The 3rd and 4th experiments examined further predictions of the sentence constraint account, in particular whether pre-activated words would compete for activation. In Experiment 3, the researchers manipulated whether an expected target word had a close competitor and found that response to the expected word was facilitated regardless of the proximity of a competitor. The 4th experiment established that close competitors were primed by the sentence frames and should have been available to compete with expected target words. Thus, word-level representations did not compete for activation.