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Ability to stand alone and processing of open-class and closed-class words: isolation versus context
1Department of Psychology, University of South Carolina, Columbia 29208, USA.
Journal of Psycholinguistic Research
|July 1, 1996
Summary
The ability of words to stand alone impacts lexical decision times, but this effect disappears when words are presented in sentence contexts. Sentence context supports word processing, influencing perceived meaningfulness.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Psychology
- Psycholinguistics
- Computational Linguistics
Background:
- Previous research indicated word meaningfulness affects lexical decision times.
- Taft (1990) found words unable to stand alone showed longer lexical decision responses.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the influence of word isolation versus sentence context on lexical decision.
- To re-evaluate the role of word meaningfulness in lexical processing.
Main Methods:
- Replication of Taft's (1990) lexical decision tasks with isolated words.
- Lexical decision tasks using a moving window paradigm with words in sentence contexts.
Main Results:
- Experiments 1 and 2 replicated the "stand-alone" effect for isolated words.
- Experiments 3 and 4 showed the "stand-alone" effect was absent in sentence contexts.
- Sentence context mitigated the impact of a word's ability to stand alone on processing speed.
Conclusions:
- The "stand-alone" effect on lexical decision is context-dependent.
- Sentence-level information (syntactic, lexical, semantic) influences perceived word meaningfulness.
- Taft's (1990) conclusions regarding word meaningfulness and lexical decisions require revision.
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