Phonological typicality influences sentence processing in predictive contexts: Reply to Staub, Grant, Clifton, and Rayner (2009)

Thomas Farmer, Padraic Monaghan, Jennifer Misyak, Morten Christiansen

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

26 Citations (Scopus)

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.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)1318-1325
JournalJournal of Experimental Psychology: Learning Memory and Cognition
Volume37
Issue number5
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2011

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