Abstract
Five experiments are reported that investigated whether the plausibility effect is caused by lexical priming resulting from the higher proportion of related words in plausible than in implausible sentences. In Experiment 1, a plausibility effect was demonstrated that was entirely attributable to the way in which lexical items were combined rather than to the properties of individual lexical items. In Experiment 2, the content words from the sentences used in Experiment 1 were shown to produce a similar reaction-time difference in a task in which syntactic processing was disrupted, supporting a lexical priming explanation of the plausibility effect. However, Experiments 3 and 4 demonstrated that, in another task less prone to task-specific strategies but sensitive to plausibility, the disruption of syntactic processing eliminated the effect. In Experiment 5, it was shown that when lexical priming was eliminated, a plausibility effect still occurred. Thus, two separate lines of evidence suggested that the plausibility effect cannot be fully explained in terms of lexical priming.
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The experiments reported are part of a doctoral dissertation submitted to the Monash University Department of Psychology.
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Ratcliff, J.E. The plausibility effect: Lexical priming or sentential processing?. Memory & Cognition 15, 482–496 (1987). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03198382
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03198382