The effect of lexical priming on sentence comprehension: an fMRI study

This study used repetition priming to examine the influence of lexical processing on sentence comprehension processing. In order to do that the effect of the lexical priming of nouns and verbs on active compared to passive sentences was investigated. The results revealed that facilitating lexical access resulted in the facilitation of sentence comprehension processes. More specifically it was found that while lexical priming of the nouns and verbs within a sentence aids sentence comprehension processes - reduced reaction time to the comprehension probe - verb priming appears to have a greater impact, particularly on syntactic level processes. This is demonstrated by a priming effect observed in left BA 44, a region that has been linked to syntactic level processing, only for verb repetition. These results also support previous studies that have reported a differential neural representation for nouns and verbs; priming effects for these two grammatical classes were observed in different brain regions.