Grammatical incongruency and vocabulary types.
Four experiments conducted in French were performed to investigate the role of grammatical congruency and vocabulary class on lexical decision times. In Experiment 1, using a double lexical decision, slower reaction times were found for pairs of words that disagreed in gender or number than for congruent pairs. Experiments 2, 3, and 4 tested this effect with a standard priming procedure. The grammatical congruency effect varied according to presentation times (130, 150, or 500 msec) and to vocabulary class of context word (closed or open). Closed-class context words induced stronger grammatical effect than did open-class words. These results suggest that the grammatical link existing between the two words of a pair is more immediately computed when the first one is a closed-class item and argue for a distinct computational role of open- and closed-class words in sentence processing.
Colé
P
P
Laboratory of Experimental Psychology, University of Nice Sophia-Antipolis, Nice, France.
Segui
J
J
D005602:France; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D011939:Mental Recall; D010153:Paired-Associate Learning; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D011930:Reaction Time; D012660:Semantics; D014825:Vocabulary