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Low-constraint facilitation in lexical decision with single-word contexts.
G Lukatela1, C Carello, A Kostić
1University of Belgrade, Yugoslavia.
The American Journal of Psychology
|January 1, 1988
Summary
Plausible adjective-noun pairs, or congruent situations, speed up word recognition. Implausible pairs, or incongruent situations, did not affect recognition speed, suggesting a coherence check in language processing.
Area of Science:
- Psycholinguistics
- Cognitive Psychology
Background:
- Investigating semantic priming effects in language comprehension.
- Examining how context influences lexical decision tasks.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the impact of semantic congruence on lexical decision.
- To test predictions of Forster's (1979) autonomous levels model.
Main Methods:
- Used single-word, low-constraint adjective contexts to prime noun targets in Serbo-Croat.
- Compared semantically congruent (plausible) and incongruent (implausible) adjective-noun pairs.
- Measured reaction times at stimulus onset asynchronies of 300 ms and 800 ms.
Main Results:
- Congruent adjective-noun pairs showed significant facilitation (59 ms at 300 ms SOA, 67 ms at 800 ms SOA).
- Incongruent pairs did not differ from the neutral baseline.
- Facilitation effects were consistent across different stimulus onset asynchronies.
Conclusions:
- Semantic congruence, even with low predictability, facilitates lexical access.
- Results support the notion of a message-level coherence check in language processing.
- Findings align with models of autonomous levels of language processing.