Context effects in visual word recognition: lexical relatedness and syntactic context

Area of Science:

• Psycholinguistics
• Cognitive Psychology
• Computational Linguistics

Background:

• Associative word-word priming is a key phenomenon in psycholinguistics.
• Previous research indicates syntactic context affects priming, but findings are debated.
• The role of specific syntactic features, like gender agreement, requires further investigation.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate how associative word-word priming in German is affected by different syntactic contexts.
• To examine whether priming effects differ between syntactically correct sentences, scrambled word lists, and sentences with gender disagreement.
• To clarify the impact of local syntactic coherence on associative priming.

Main Methods:

• Three experiments were conducted using visually presented German word strings.
• Participants were presented with prime-target word pairs embedded in different syntactic contexts.
• Associative priming effects were measured by comparing reaction times in different conditions.

Main Results:

• Associative priming effects were observed in both syntactically correct sentences and scrambled word lists.
• Priming effects were eliminated when the target noun and its preceding definite article showed syntactic gender disagreement.
• This indicates that local violations of syntactic coherence disrupt associative priming.

Conclusions:

• Associative priming is robust and occurs even in syntactically unstructured word lists.
• Syntactic coherence, particularly local agreement, plays a crucial role in modulating associative priming.
• The findings contribute to understanding the interplay between syntax and semantic processing in language comprehension.