Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Context effects on lexical decisions were anatomised bymanipulating lexical relatedness in syntactic andasyntactic sequences. In a Syntactic condition, relatedor unrelated word-pairs were embedded in simplesequences (e.g., a truck or a CAR/FLOOR). In aScrambled condition, two inapposite function words weresubstituted between the related and unrelated nouns(e.g., the truck that before CAR/FLOOR). The phraseswere presented serially and subjects made lexicaldecisions to their terminal elements. Substantialrelatedness effects were found only in syntacticsequences, whether presentation rate was slow or whetherit exceeded the rate of normal reading. The syntacticrelatedness effect was shown to consist, in equalproportions, of facilitation of related words andinhibition of unrelated words. These results argueagainst a role for intralexical priming in on-linereading. They point up the roles of syntacticconnectedness and of the current interpretation even invery rudimentary contexts.