Home > Research > Publications & Outputs > Phonological Typicality Influences Sentence Pro...
View graph of relations

Phonological Typicality Influences Sentence Processing in Predictive Contexts: Reply to Staub, Grant, Clifton, and Rayner (2009)

Research output: Contribution to Journal/MagazineJournal articlepeer-review

Published
Close
<mark>Journal publication date</mark>09/2011
<mark>Journal</mark>Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition
Issue number5
Volume37
Number of pages8
Pages (from-to)1318-1325
Publication StatusPublished
<mark>Original language</mark>English

Abstract

In 2 separate self-paced reading experiments, Farmer, Christiansen, and Monaghan (2006) found that the degree to which a word's phonology is typical of other words in its lexical category influences online processing of nouns and verbs in predictive contexts. Staub, Grant, Clifton. and Rayner (2009) failed to find an effect of phonological typicality when they combined stimuli from the separate experiments into a single experiment. We replicated Staub et al.'s experiment and found that the combination of stimulus sets affects the predictiveness of the syntactic context; this reduces the phonological typicality effect as the experiment proceeds, although the phonological typicality effect was still evident early in the experiment. Although an ambiguous context may diminish sensitivity to the probabilistic relationship between the sound of a word and its lexical category. phonological typicality does influence online sentence processing during normal reading when the syntactic context is predictive of the lexical category of upcoming words.