ABSTRACT
Three experiments test for semantically mediated priming of a word's phonology (e.g., sofa, an associate of couch, primes naming performance to touch). In the first two experiments, words that were body-rime-inconsistent (compare touch to couch) were used as naming targets. In the third experiment, words that were body-rime-consistent were also used (i.e., sofa primed pouch). Low-frequency inconsistent words yield a high rate of pronunciation errors when they were primed by indirectly related words, such as sofa, in both a standard naming task and a speeded naming task. High-frequency inconsistent words yielded slower naming times when they were primed by indirectly related words in a speeded naming task, but consistent words showed no significant effects of the primes. The results suggest that the relationship between semantics and phonology plays an important, early role in word perception.
Subject(s)
Cues , Phonetics , Recognition, Psychology , Semantics , Adult , Female , Humans , Male , Models, Psychological , ReadingABSTRACT
Three experiments compared the qualitative pattern of participants' word-naming performance in a syntactic priming task with the qualitative pattern of performance generated by a recurrent network model. Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrated that when participants had a 600-ms response deadline, the appropriateness of a syntactic prime affected their naming times for high-frequency words but not low-frequency words. However, Experiment 2 also demonstrated that participants made the most pronunciation errors when naming inconsistent low-frequency words (e.g., pint) that were preceded by an inappropriate prime. The results of Experiment 3 suggest that participants' naming times to both high- and low-frequency words are affected by syntactic primes when there is no response deadline. The implication of these findings for the study of syntactic priming in English and other languages is discussed.
