Abstract
We used the grammatical decision task to investigate fast priming of written sentence processing. Targets were sequences of 5 words that either formed a grammatically correct sentence or were ungrammatical. Primes were sequences of 5 words and could be the same word sequence as targets, a different sequence of words with a similar syntactic structure, the same sequence with two inner words transposed or the same sequence with two inner words substituted by different words. Prime-word sequences were presented in a larger font size than targets for 200 ms and followed by the target sequence after a 100 ms delay. We found robust repetition priming in grammatical decisions, with same sequence primes leading to faster responses compared with prime sequences containing different words. We also found transposed-word priming effects, with faster responses following a transposed-word prime compared with substituted-word primes. We conclude that fast primed grammatical decisions might offer investigations of written sentence processing what fast primed lexical decisions have offered studies of visual word recognition.
Highlights
The field of visual word recognition has benefitted from priming methodology for more than half a century
We analysed response times (RTs) for correct responses, which is the time between the onset of target presentation until participants’ response, and error rate
7 Crucially, prime-word sequences were presented for only 200 ms, making it highly unlikely that our participants were using slow inferential processes in an attempt to improve their responses to targets
Summary
The field of visual word recognition has benefitted from priming methodology for more than half a century. The controlled processes operating at longer SOAs could involve several strategies, such as trying to guess target word identity on the basis of prime word identity, or biasing responses when participants notice the relation between prime and target stimuli (e.g. in a lexical decision task, if a semantic relation is detected, the target must be a word). These are thought to be slow inferential processes, compared with the rapid, automatic processing thought to underly the linguistic processes of interest. Much shorter prime durations (of the order of 50–60 ms) were later to become the gold standard in word recognition research [5], Neely’s demonstration is important for studies, such as the present one, where extremely short prime exposure durations are inconceivable
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