Abstract
This study investigated the hypothesis that syntactic and semantic constraints play different roles in the recognition of spoken words. In particular, for inflected words, semantic constraints affect the recognition of the base, whereas syntactic constraints affect recognition of the fully inflected form. In a gating study we investigated the identification of inflected words in conditions which covaried the presence or absence of semantic and syntactic constraints. Under conditions of strong syntactic constraint, the entire word, complete with inflection, was correctly identified as soon as the base was identified. Under conditions of weak syntactic constraint, identification of the inflected full-form fell on average 200 ms later than the stem identification point. The effect of semantic constraint was simply to move the base identification point earlier in the word, but without changing its relationship with the identification point of the full-form.
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