CONJOINT AND DISSOCIABLE EFFECTS OF SYNTACTIC AND SEMANTIC CONTEXT

Manipulating the semantic relatedness of noun and verb targets in cont exts where they are grammatically appropriate or inappropriate allows for simultaneous examination of syntactic and semantic context effects . A lexical-decision experiment showed both a syntactic context effect and a semantic relatedness effect that was stronger in syntactically appropriate conditions. Thus, latencies appeared to be conjointly dete rmined by syntactic and semantic context. In contrast, naming experime nts also showed both semantic and syntactic effects, but the syntactic context effect was independent of semantic relatedness and was observ ed in the virtual absence of sensitivity to semantic anomaly. Thus, sy ntactic and semantic processing are largely dissociable in the naming task. In conjunction with other findings in the literature, this sugge sts the existence of an isolable level of syntactic assignment that pr ecedes semantic integration of content words in sentence comprehension .