Abstract
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.
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Colé, P., Segui, J. Grammatical incongruency and vocabulary types. Mem Cogn 22, 387–394 (1994). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03200865
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03200865