Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Recent studies have revealed interesting differences between lexical decision and naming tasks. Naming responses seem to be primarily sensitive tolexical processes and lexical decisions to both lexical and message-level processes. This differential sensitivity to level of representation was used to investigate the following questions: 1) Are probable instruments for an action routinely inferred during sentence comprehension? Previous work may have failed to show that instrximents are inferred, in part, because processing measures were used that were relatively insensitive to the level of representation involved in the inference and 2) If instruments are inferred,does this process require accessing elements of the linguistic or the constructed representation? Four experiments were performed that used cross modallexical decision and naming tasks as measures of instrtunent priming in sentences that implied the use of an instrviment. No priming was found for sentences with no context, replicating Dosher and Corbett (1982). When sentences were preceded by a context that explicitly mentioned the instrument,however, priming was found with the lexical decision task. In combination with the result of the first two experiments, this suggests that instrument sare inferred when the instrument implied by a sentence is available from the context but not when sentences are presented without contexts. Priming was not foxind with the naming task, however. The lexical decision/naming data together suggest that making an instrument inference involves accessing elements of a constructed representation of the discourse.In addition, in sentences that contained pronoxins that referred to the instruments, priming was found for appropriate referents with the lexical decision task but not with naming. This suggests that locating antecedents for pronouns also involves a constructed representation.