Robust effects of syntactic structure on visual word processing

Abstract

A series of experiments explored the effect of the syntactic structure of a sentence fragment on the processing of a subsequent target word. In both a naming and a lexical decision task, modal verb contexts followed by main verb targets and preposition contexts followed by noun targets produced faster response times than did the opposite pairings (i.e., modal/noun and preposition/ verb). This syntactic context effect occurred across several different variations in the method of context presentation. Also, unlike some previous findings on syntactic priming, the present effects did not disappear when a naming task was employed. The magnitude of the syntactic priming effect was similar in the naming and lexical decision tasks when the response times were slow, but was larger in the lexical decision task when the response times were faster. The implications of these results for recent discussions of the relationship between task structure and the locus of observed contextual effects are discussed.