Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Syntactic and semantic relatedness were orthogonally varied in a series of experiments by presenting semantically related and unrelated noun and verb targets in phrasal contexts syntactically disposing to nouns or verbs. In addition, the subjects' task, naming or lexical decision on the target, was varied across experiments. In lexical decision,semantic facilitation and inhibition effects depended on context-target match, especially for noun targets. In several experiments, naming data showed only weak semantic effects, which were not modulated by context-target match. However, there was clear evidence of syntactic inhibition in these experiments. Finally, robust semantic facilitation was observed in a naming experiment where contexts and targets were always syntactically matched. Thus, although in some experiments lexical decision appeared to reflect additional text-level integration processes to which naming was immune, the naming task was less consistent across experiments. This contradiction may be resolved if a distinction is introduced between situations where lexical targets are part of the sequence being tested and situations where they are external probes.