Part-of-speech persistence: Part-of-speech category information as an organizing principle in the...

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Journal of Memory and Language 56 (2007) 472–489

Memory andLanguage

Part-of-speech persistence: The influence of part-of-speechinformation on lexical processes q

Alissa Melinger a,*, Jean-Pierre Koenig b

a Department of Computational Linguistics, Saarland University, Saarbrucken, Germanyb University at Buffalo, State University of New York, USA

Received 31 January 2006; revision received 5 December 2006Available online 6 February 2007

Abstract

This paper presents three naming experiments designed to investigate whether the activation levels of syn-tactic features associated with lexical items, specifically part-of-speech information, can influence lexical process-es. Naming preferences for orthographically ambiguous but phonologically distinct English nouns and verbs,such as convict (CONvictn vs. conVICTv) were compared. In Experiment 1, ambiguous target words were pre-ceded by unambiguous noun, verb, and letter (control) primes. Experiments 2 and 3 were designed to distin-guish whether the priming effects observed in Experiment 1 have a syntactic or a semantic locus. In all threeexperiments, we found an influence of the part-of-speech of the prime on speakers’ naming preferences for thetarget. The results support a model of the lexicon in which part-of-speech information can influence lexicalprocesses.� 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Mental lexicon; Homographs; Lexical processing; Syntactic priming; Part-of-speech; Grammatical class

0749-596X/$ - see front matter � 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserv

doi:10.1016/j.jml.2006.12.001

q We extend our gratitude to Thomas Pechmann, AlbertCosta, Karin Michelson, and Wendy Baldwin for helpfulcomments and discussion. We also appreciate Gail Maunerletting us use her laboratory facilities to collect the datareported here and the assistance received from Bret Bienvenuein getting the studies running on the lab machines. Some of theresults from Experiment 1 were previously reported in Melingerand Koenig (2000).

* Corresponding author. Present address: Department ofPsychology, University of Dundee, Dundee, DD1 4HN, Scot-land. Fax: +49 681 302 6561.

E-mail address: [email protected] (A. Melinger).

The average speaker of English knows upwards of30,000 words. Each word in our vocabulary has aunique triple of phonological, semantic, and syntacticinformation that distinguishes it from the other 29,999familiar words. Generalizations over phonological,semantic and syntactic information help speakers toeconomize the storage and speed the retrieval of thislarge set of words. The organization of our lexicalknowledge along these dimensions facilitates rapid andaccurate access to words. This paper focuses on theimpact of one aspect of the syntactic information thatis represented in the mental lexicon, namely part-of-speech information. Part-of-speech information (alter-natively referred to in the literature as grammatical,

ed.

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A. Melinger, J.-P. Koenig / Journal of Memory and Language 56 (2007) 472–489 473

syntactic, or lexical category) indicates the membershipof a word into one of several syntactic categories suchas noun, verb or adjective. We examine whether part-of-speech information influences lexical selection pro-cesses when only a single word is produced, or whetherpart-of-speech information is only relevant when pro-ducing larger syntactic units.

The mental lexicon is often described as a ‘mentaldictionary’ (cf. Aitchison, 1994; Goldberg, 2003; Ullmanet al., 1997), evoking an image of a list of free-standinglexical entries. But such a description misses criticaltraits of the lexicon and lexical representations. First,the mental lexicon encodes lexical relationships acrossa network of phonological, semantic and syntactic rep-resentations. Secondly, these triples of information arenot stored and accessed together as a single whole butrather are represented on their own distinct strata andeach type of representation is sensitive to different pro-cesses and accessed independently. (Note, however, thatsemantic and syntactic information are much moretightly bound to each other than they are to phonolog-ical information. This relative distance is reflectedexplicitly in some models of lexical processing, includingserial discrete models of speech production (e.g. Levelt,Roelofs, & Meyer, 1999) and some models of word rec-ognition (e.g., Gaskell & Marslen-Wilson, 1997)). Con-nections between lexical features encode both thearbitrary mapping between syntactic/semantic and pho-nological representations and also the similarity betweenlexical items. For example, all words with initial /p/ willshare a link to the representation for this phoneme.Likewise, words denoting living entities share a compo-nent of their semantic representations.

The evidence strongly suggests that semantic andphonological information influence lexical processes inboth comprehension and production. There is abundantevidence demonstrating the importance of semantic rela-tions to lexical processes (cf. Glaser & Dungelhoff, 1984;Kroll & Stewart, 1994; La Heij, 1988; Lupker, 1979,1988; Rosinski, 1977; Underwood, 1976 for evidencefrom production and Fischler, 1977; McRae & Boisvert,1998; Meyer & Schvaneveldt, 1971; Neely, 1977; Shelton& Martin, 1992 for evidence from word recognition) andthere is also abundant evidence demonstrating theimportance of phonological relations to lexical processes(e.g., Briggs & Underwood, 1982; Lupker, 1982; Neely,1991; Rayner & Springer, 1986; Tanenhaus, Flanigan,& Seidenberg, 1980; Underwood & Briggs, 1984). Inboth cases, the observed facilitatory and inhibitoryeffects are assumed to arise as a result of spreading acti-vation between shared or related representations.

But, what about the third component of lexicalknowledge, morphosyntactic features? While it is gener-ally assumed that words with a common syntacticcharacteristic are all associated to a shared morphosyn-tactic feature (Caramazza, 1997; Dell, 1986; Gaskell &

Marslen-Wilson, 1997; Levelt et al., 1999), it is unclearwhether these morphosyntactic features also influenceprocesses underlying lexical access and/or selection.

To date the evidence suggests that the processes oflexical access and production in isolation are not sensi-tive to the activation levels of syntactic features suchas grammatical gender (Friederici & Jacobsen, 1999;Vigliocco, Vinson, Indefrey, Levelt, & Hellwig, 2004a;Vigliocco, Vinson, & Paganelli, 2004b; but see Cubelli,Lotto, Paolieri, Girelli, & Job, 2005 for evidence for adirect influence of gender on lexical selection), verbselectional restrictions (Ferreira & Clifton, 1986; Ford,Bresnan, & Kaplan, 1982; Koenig, Mauner, & Bienve-nue, 2003; MacDonald, 1994; Melinger & Dobel, 2005;Novick, Kim, & Trueswell, 2003; Trueswell & Kim,1998; Trueswell, Tanenhaus, & Garnsey, 1994), orpart-of-speech (Pechmann & Zerbst, 2002; Seidenberg,Tanenhaus, Leiman, & Bienkowski, 1982; Tanenhaus,Leiman, & Seidenberg, 1979; Vigliocco, Vinson, & Siri,2005; also see Tanenhaus & Lucas, 1987, for an earlyreview). These studies suggest that syntactic informationexerts its influence only when an accessed word is inte-grated into an unfolding syntactic frame.

One source of evidence for the influence of lexicallyspecified morphosyntactic features on lexical selectionprocesses embedded within larger syntactic units comesfrom the syntactic category constraint observed in speecherrors. In word substitutions and exchanges, the interact-ing words commonly come from the same syntactic cat-egory (Fromkin, 1971; Garrett, 1975); nouns exchangewith nouns, verbs exchange with verbs and, in gendermarking languages, nouns of a particular genderexchange with nouns of the same gender (Marx, 1999).Furthermore, Ferreira and Humphreys (2001) demon-strated that even stem exchange errors like ‘trucked thepark’, which seemingly violate the syntactic categoryconstraint, in fact respect it. Specifically, they showedthat when the exchange error involved stress shiftingstems, such as ‘reCORD’ vs. ‘REcord’, the stress patternfor the frame-appropriate part-of-speech was produced.In other words, speakers produced the constraint-violat-ing error ‘REcorded the tape’ less often than the con-straint-respecting error ‘reCORDed the tape’. Thesefindings suggest that lexical selection is minimally partialto, and maximally restricted to, lexical candidates whichfit the relevant slot in the unfolding syntactic frame.

However, the syntactic category constraint seems toplay a role only when larger syntactic units are beingconstructed. Vigliocco et al. (2004a) showed that, inthe context of a gender-marking article, semantic substi-tution errors respect the grammatical gender of theintended target word (see also Marx, 1999). However,grammatical gender was not preserved in utterances inwhich gender information was not relevant namely dur-ing bare nouns naming. This result suggests that syntac-tic features only impact lexical processes in syntactic

474 A. Melinger, J.-P. Koenig / Journal of Memory and Language 56 (2007) 472–489

contexts. Even inherent syntactic features, such as gram-matical gender or part-of-speech, may not be relevant tosingle word processes.

Converging evidence for the claim that syntactic fea-tures do not influence the production of single wordscomes from experiments using the picture-word interfer-ence paradigm. Schriefers (1993) showed that picturenaming is faster when a simultaneously presented dis-tractor word has the same grammatical gender as thetarget name. However, these effects are only observedwhen speakers produce a gender marked noun phrase.When they produce single nouns without a gender mark-ing article or adjective, no gender congruency effect isobserved (La Heij, Mak, Sander, & Willeboordse,1998). Similarly for part-of-speech, Pechmann andZerbst (2002; Pechmann, Garrett, & Zerbst, 2004)showed that picture-naming times were slower when dis-tractor words came from the same part-of-speech as theto-be-named picture, namely nouns, than when theycame from a different part-of-speech, namely closedclass items or adverbs. This part-of-speech effect, howev-er, was only observed when the picture-naming eventwas embedded within a larger syntactic context, notwhen the picture was named in isolation. These resultssuggest that both part-of-speech and grammatical gen-der only become relevant to production when they arecrucial for the unfolding syntactic units.

To conclude, the experimental results seem to suggestthat lexically specified syntactic information may have adifferent status within the mental lexicon than eitherphonological or semantic information. Specifically,while the latter are always involved in production, theformer may only play a role when producing the rele-vant syntactic units. Why should syntactic features havethis restricted influence? According to models of singleword production, lexical selection is driven by semanticinformation. The semantic representations at the mes-sage-level indicate which concept the speaker intendsto express and, via spreading activation, the appropriatelexical item, as well as semantically related lexical items,are activated. Thus, for single word production, syntaxplays no role. However, we rarely produce words in iso-lation, thus models of sentence production have suggest-ed that a ‘‘division of labor’’ between syntax andsemantics is needed when formulating larger syntacticunits to produce the right word at the right time (cf.Gordon & Dell, 2003). In other words, semantics dis-criminates fork from knife and syntax helps to discrimi-nate the noun fork from the verb to fork. To capture thisaspect of syntax-driven lexical selection, some modelspropose that activation spreads into the lexicon fromactive slots within syntactic frames that are currentlyunder construction (Dell, 1986; Dell, Schwartz, Martin,Saffran, & Gagnon, 1997; Gordon & Dell, 2003; Stem-berger, 1985). In other words, when selecting a wordto fill a noun slot within a noun phrase, the noun slot

will send activation to all compatible lexical items, help-ing to ensure that a word from the correct part-of-speechis selected.

This architecture seems to include the mechanism thatis in principle needed to see effects of morphosyntacticfeatures on lexical selection in isolation. In order for asyntactic category effect to arise, the system must be ableto identify words’ syntactic features and selectively or atleast preferentially activate lexical items from the appro-priate set. For example, when producing a noun within anoun phrase, the noun slot will feed activation back tothe lexical candidates via morphosyntactic features tohelp ensure that the selected word comes from the correctpart-of-speech. After the noun has been selected, theremight be residual activation within the system. Normal-ly, when producing a sentence, this residual activationwould be overridden by the activation of the subsequentslot within the putative syntactic frame. We will refer tosuch an effect as syntagmatic. But, during single wordaccess, there is no subsequent slot to interfere with thepotential impact of the residual activation. Thus, onemight expect to see evidence of feedback into the lexiconfrom activated morphosyntactic features. We will refer tosuch an effect as paradigmatic.

Unfortunately, the data reviewed above do not sup-port paradigmatic effects. Possibly, the absence of para-digmatic effects is due to the fact that syntactic featuresare not relevant for single word production and so arenot selected (Levelt et al., 1999), even if they encodeinherent characteristics of the words (e.g., part-of-speechor grammatical gender). The received view, namely thatsyntactic information only exerts an influence on syntac-tic combinatory processes and not on lexical processes,is one way to capture the reviewed pattern of results.However, there is an alternative explanation, one whichwe pursue in this paper and which incorporates a lexicaleffect of syntactic information. It is possible that syntac-tic information exerts an influence whenever it is rele-vant to the utterance under consideration, be it asingle word, phrase, or sentence. Such a view is equallyconsistent with the results presented above, since thesyntactic features under investigation were only relevantin the syntactic context, not when producing individualwords. In fact, as syntactic information serves to con-strain how words can be combined into well-formedstrings, it makes sense that its influence would be mostoften observed in larger syntactic contexts. But, thisalternative interpretation makes the additional predic-tion that, when the syntactic information is relevant tothe processing of isolated words, the effect of syntacticinformation should still be observed, even in the absenceof combinatory processes. The experiments we report inthis paper explicitly test this prediction.

There is data that supports the alternative view forgrammatical gender. Gender congruency effects in pro-duction are generally observed only in phrasal contexts


in which a gender distinguishing determiner is produced;when no determiner is produced gender congruencyeffects are not observed (La Heij et al., 1998). Congruen-cy effects in gender marked noun phrases have beenrepeatedly observed in Dutch and German, two lan-guages which do not systematically encode gender onthe head noun. However, a recent study conducted inItalian reported gender congruency effects in bare nounnaming (Cubelli et al., 2005). One critical differencebetween Italian and Dutch/German is that Italian inflec-tionally marks gender on head nouns. Most Italiannouns end with an inflectional suffix that encodes num-ber and gender. Thus, the gender feature is needed tofully encode the phonological form of the word. Cubelliet al. suggest that this critical difference leads to cross-linguistically distinct results for gender congruencyeffects.

In the experiments we report in this paper, we testthis alternative view for part-of-speech information.Committing to a part-of-speech is also sometimes neces-sary in order to phonologically encode words of English.Many words in English are phonologically and ortho-graphically ambiguous with respect to part-of-speech,e.g., hammer and fish, which are both nouns and verbs.Although zero-derived words such as hammer and fish

are usually disambiguated within a sentence context, itis unclear whether speakers commit to a single part-of-speech when they encounter these words in isolationsince nothing in the realization of such words hingeson the distinction. However, in some cases pronuncia-tion does discriminate part-of-speech. For example,while the words convict, delegate and misuse are ortho-graphically ambiguous between nouns and verbs, theirpronunciations crucially depend on the part-of-speech.

Convict is an example of the stress shifting stems pre-viously investigated by, for example, Ferreira andHumphreys (2001). Stress shifting bisyllabic words typi-cally have initial stress as nouns but final stress as verbs.Likewise, trisyllabic stress shifting words like delegate

have unstressed final syllables with reduced vowels whenpronounced as nouns and stressed final syllables withfull vowels when pronounced as verbs. Words like mis-

use indicate their part-of-speech change via a voicingalternation; they have a voiceless final consonant as anoun but a voiced final consonant as a verb. For phono-logically distinct orthographically ambiguous words,then, before a speaker can name the word she mustmake a decision about its part-of-speech. For those syn-tactically ambiguous words, pronunciation revealswhich part-of-speech representation was selected.

Syntactically ambiguous words can be used as a testcase for the hypothesis that part-of-speech information,as an organizing feature of the lexicon, impacts lexicalprocessing when it is task-relevant. If this hypothesis iscorrect, it should be possible to elicit part-of-speechpriming, or persistence, effects. Specifically, the presenta-

tion of an unambiguous noun or verb prime wordshould influence the part-of-speech bias of individualambiguous words. By preceding zero-derived words withunambiguous noun and verb primes, the outcome of lex-ical selection processes should be affected. The part-of-speech information of the prime may persist, leadingspeakers to produce more noun or verb pronunciationsthan they would in an unbiased condition. By compar-ing speakers’ pronunciations of ambiguous words, wecan identify whether residual activation of part-of-speech features has any effect on the lexical selectionprocess independent of the syntactic context in whichwords occur.

Experiment 1

To determine whether part-of-speech informationinfluences lexical selection processes, we developed apart-of-speech priming task. This task is similar to syn-tactic priming methodologies (e.g., Bock, 1986) in sofar as the dependent measure is not reaction time butrather utterance type. Participants read pairs of words,displayed on consecutive presentations. In critical tri-als, the prime word is unambiguously categorizableinto (or strongly biased towards) a single part-of-speech. The target word is orthographically ambiguousbetween part-of-speech but phonologically distinct. Asin syntactic priming studies, we predict that speakerswill be biased to produce a pronunciation consistentwith the part-of-speech of the prime word. Specifically,we expect more noun pronunciations following nounprimes compared to verb primes and more verb pro-nunciations following verb primes compared to nounprimes. This pattern of results would support a para-

digmatic effect of part-of-speech information. However,if part-of-speech information is only relevant to combi-natory processes, not to lexical processes, we mightobserve the reverse pattern of effects. Namely, wemight find a syntagmatic use of part-of-speech informa-tion in which an unambiguous noun triggers a prefer-ence for a verb pronunciation and a dispreference fornoun pronunciations. This pattern of results wouldarise from our knowledge of how words combinetogether into well-formed strings. Since in sentencecontexts nouns are followed by verbs more often thanby other noun phrases and verbs are followed by nounphrases more often than other main verbs, a syntag-matic biasing effect of the part-of-speech manipulationshould lead to a change in category rather than a per-sistence of category. Thus, with this task we can evalu-ate first whether part-of-speech information is relevantto lexical processing and second whether part-of-speechinformation only influences syntagmatic combinatoryprocesses, as prior results have shown, or also paradig-matic selection processes.


Method

Participants

Eighty undergraduates from the University at Buffa-lo, State University of New York received partial coursecredit for their participation.

Materials

Thirty category-ambiguous words were selected astargets. The majority (N = 25) of the targets weremorphological alternates like record, but a few werederivationally unrelated homographs like dove

(N = 5). The set of targets were matched for frequencyof occurrence as nouns and verbs, with a mean logfrequency of 1.11 in each category (Francis & Kucera,1982). The part-of-speech alternation was marked byfour different phonological alternations across the setof targets. Nineteen of the targets marked the alterna-tion with a primary stress shift, four marked it with asecondary stress shift, three with a voicing alternationand four with a vowel alternation not related to stress(e.g., dove).

Each target word was paired with an unambiguous(or strongly frequency biased) noun, verb, and lettercontrol prime. Example prime-target pairs from thethree prime conditions are given in (1) and the full setof prime-target pairs are presented in Appendix A.

THORN
(1) SEND
– RECORD
noun prime
– RECORD
verb prime
CORD
letter prime D – RE
Frequency counts for primes were taken from Fran-cis and Kucera (1982) and the Celex database (Baayenet al., 1995). Words were considered unambiguous ifthey had only one entry in the Francis and Kucera list.However, as zero derivation from nouns to verbs andvice versa is a very productive process in English, itwas difficult to find wholly unambiguous nouns andverbs which also satisfied the other restrictions for primeselection, described below. Thus, some of our primewords were not fully unambiguous but rather stronglyfrequency-biased towards either a noun or verb catego-ry. In these cases, only words whose noun frequency wasat least an order of magnitude greater than its verb fre-quency, or vice versa, were selected.

Primes shared neither orthographic, phonological(including stress pattern), nor semantic content withtheir paired target words. The noun and verb primesassigned to a given target word (e.g., THORN andSEND) were matched for frequency of occurrence anddegree of imageability (Coltheart, 1981). Phonologicalcharacteristics that are distributionally (and statistically)associated with a particular part-of-speech (e.g., nouns

commonly end with voiceless stops while verbs com-monly end in voiced stops; nouns are more likely to con-tain nasals) were equally represented in both noun andverb prime sets (Kelly, 1992; Monaghan, Chater, &Christiansen, 2005). Specifically, we checked that thephonological characteristics of stress placement, numberof syllables, final consonant voicing, stressed vowel type,and presence of a nasal consonant were not over- orunder-represented in one of the two prime sets. In theset of noun primes, 21 were monosyllabic, seven werebisyllabic with initial stress and two were trisyllabic.One of the trisyllabic words had final stress. In the setof verb primes, 23 were monosyllabic, six were bisyllabicand one was trisyllabic. Of the multisyllabic verb primes,only two had the stress pattern typical of the targets asverbs.

The letter control condition was included to providea neutral baseline. We opted for this rather unconven-tional control over real or nonce-words for a numberof reasons. Single letter controls are less likely than realor nonce words to induce spurious priming effects. Usingfunction words or other major lexical categories likeadjectives or adverbs as a baseline could easily producesyntagmatic category priming effects (see Experiment 2for supporting evidence). Nonce words could resemblereal words and thereby produce biasing effects. The sin-gle letter control was opted for over repeated presenta-tion of a single letter (e.g., DDDDD), which wouldhave made the baseline string length comparable to theother conditions, because we felt single letters wouldbe more natural for participants to name. Includingthe letter condition as a control is also preferred to anunprimed condition, as it is more similar to the otherexperimental conditions.

Item pairs were counter balanced across three presen-tation lists. Participants saw each target word once and athird of the prime items. Ninety unambiguous distractorprime/target pairs, consisting of letters, prepositions,adjectives, and adverbs, were also included. Prime andtarget filler pairs were rarely the same part-of-speech;thus no experimental expectancy for part-of-speech per-sistence was artificially introduced.

Procedure

Primes and targets were presented sequentially withan intrastimulus interval of 500 ms. Both were dis-played until a naming response was produced. Primeswere centered on the computer screen in capital letters;targets, also in capital letters, appeared two lines belowwhere the prime had been displayed. Participants wereinstructed to read all words aloud as quickly as possi-ble. After each trial, participants proceeded to the nexttrial pair by pressing the space bar. Experimental ses-sions were recorded, and the recordings were thenscored by two independent blind raters for part-of-speech classification.

Fig. 1. Proportion of noun pronunciations in three primeconditions.


Results and discussion

Rater agreement for part-of-speech classification was94%; trials for which the raters did not agree wereexcluded from the analysis. Additionally, three itemsthat produced high error rates due to unclear pronunci-ations were also excluded from the analyses, as were allerror trials. Error trials consisted of cases in which theparticipant produced a non-word or a non-target wordor in which the raters did not commit to a classification.In total, 19% of trials were excluded, leaving 1966 validresponses to contribute to the analysis.

For the analysis of part-of-speech persistence in thisand subsequent experiments, we computed a measurethat was designed to determine the relative proportionsof noun and verb pronunciations in each of the primingconditions (cf. Branigan, Pickering, & Cleland, 2000).This measure was the number of noun target pronunci-ations divided by the sum of noun and verb targetresponses (the use of noun rather than verb responsesis arbitrary). These ratios were adjusted using the ARC-SIN transformation (Kirk, 1982) before being submittedto separate analyses of variance treating participants(F1) and items (F2) as random effects. The resultingF’s were then combined to produce the MinF’ statistic(Clark, 1973). Analyses were within-participants andwithin-items. Although statistical tests are conductedon the ARCSIN adjusted proportions, graphs and meandifferences (Mdiff) are calculated based on the untrans-formed proportions. 95% confidence intervals are calcu-lated around the differences between condition meansusing the error term from the relevant interaction ratherthan pooling error terms.

Results from the analysis including the factor PrimeType (Noun, Verb and Letter) are presented in Table 1.Fig. 1 shows the untransformed proportions of nounresponses in the three prime conditions. As can be seen,we observed a significant main effect of Prime Type. Tar-gets preceded by noun primes were produced as nounsmore often than when preceded by verb primes,Mdiff = .14, CI= ± .037, or letter primes, Mdiff = .07,CI= ± .039. Similarly, targets preceded by verb primesproduced fewer noun pronunciations than when preceded

Table 1Analysis of variance summary for Experiment 1

Effect By participants (F1)

df F1 MSE

Prime type 2, 158 12.21*** .046 2Linear trend 1, 79 25.25*** .045 1Quadratic trend 1, 79 0.02 .048 1

** p < .01.*** p < .001.

by letter primes, Mdiff = .07, CI= ± .036. A linear trendanalysis was performed to further assess the graded natureof the part-of-speech persistence effect. The linear trendwas significant, but the corresponding quadratic trendwas not, indicating that we observe a proportional mono-tonic decrease in the proportion of noun pronunciationsproduced as we move from the noun prime condition tothe letter control condition and finally to the verb primecondition.

As predicted, the part-of-speech of the prime wordhad an influence on the naming preference of speakersfor the category-ambiguous target words. When theprime word was a noun, speakers were more likely toname the homograph as a noun; when the prime was averb, speakers were more likely to name the homographas a verb. The results demonstrate that morphosyntacticfeatures can influence a speaker’s retrieval bias whenfaced with multiple options. Furthermore, the resultsare observed without a syntactic context, suggesting thatthe part-of-speech information can influence lexical pro-cesses in addition to restricting combinatory processes.The results also confirm the adequacy of the letter primecondition as a baseline control; speakers named the tar-get words as nouns 50% of the time and as verbs 50% of

By items (F2) Min F 0

df F2 MSE df Min F 0

, 52 10.82*** .022 2, 146 5.75**

, 26 20.7*** .023 1, 71 11.3**

, 26 0.001 .021 1, 28 0.00


the time, reflecting the absence of a strong dominancerelationship between the two possible category alterna-tives for the targets.

The data are compatible with a model in whichunambiguous noun or verb primes activate the morpho-syntactic nodes that express the appropriate categoryinformation. When the subsequent ambiguous target ispresented, one of the two possible part-of-speech nodeshas residual activation from the prime. The residual acti-vation of this node renders it easier to select than thecompeting unprimed morphosyntactic node, thus influ-encing lexical selection processes. There is, however, analternative explanation for the reported pattern ofresults; they can also be interpreted as a semantic prim-ing effect. There is a certain amount of common seman-tic content shared across the set of nouns and across theset of verbs. The items selected as primes for this studyare typical of their respective part-of-speech categoriesin that the nouns denote objects and the verbs denoteevents (see Croft, 1991; Langacker, 1987; Pesetsky,1981). Thus, it is possible that rather than observing apersistence of the syntactic feature part-of-speech, theresults of Experiment 1 may reveal a persistence of thesemantic features object or event. Experiments 2 and 3were designed to examine whether the observed persis-tence effects involve syntactic or semanticrepresentations.

Experiment 2

Experiment 2 employs two approaches to examiningthe locus of the part-of-speech persistence effect. Thefirst approach is to change the semantic features of theprimes, choosing semantically non-prototypical nounprimes. To this end, we used abstract nouns, like truth

and fact, rather than concrete nouns. Abstract nounsrefer to intangible elements such as emotions, events,concepts, etc. Abstract nouns still have common seman-tics with the target nouns, but they do not activate the‘object’ feature most type-frequently associated withnoun semantics (see the General Discussion for moredetails). In order for a semantic priming effect to beobserved in this experiment, the priming must be derivedfrom an extremely general and abstract semantic catego-ry such as ‘thing’ rather than ‘object’. A second way ofexamining the locus of the persistence effect is to removethe syntactic commonality between prime and targetwhile maintaining a semantic relationship comparableto that of the noun condition. To this end, state-denot-ing adjectives, such as fresh and late, were used asprimes. Adjectives and verbs are semantically similarin that they are both predicates and they both denoteeventualities, the union of events and states (Bach,1986). By preceding the ambiguous targets with unam-biguous adjectives, a semantic relationship comparable

to that in the abstract noun condition is maintainedbut the syntactic similarity is lost.

If the persistence effects reported in Experiment 1 aresemantically-driven, we should observe persistenceeffects in both the noun and adjective conditions,although the magnitude of the effect may be reducedcompared to what was observed in Experiment 1. Specif-ically, abstract nouns should bias speakers to producenouns and state-denoting adjectives should bias speak-ers to produce verbs. However, if the effects are catego-rially-driven, then we should observe comparablepersistence effects only in the noun condition and notin the adjective condition, since primes and targets nolonger share part-of-speech information.

Since our dependent measure is analogous to thedependent measure used in structural persistence stud-ies, we used a large number of participants in Experi-ment 1 (based on the number of participants oftenused in syntactic priming studies, cf. Bock & Griffin,2000; Bock & Loebell, 1990). However, since the effectswere quite stable, in the subsequent experiment wereduced the number of participants tested.

Method

Participants

Forty-two undergraduates from the University atBuffalo, State University of New York received partialcourse credit for their participation.

Materials

Thirty category ambiguous words were selected astargets. Although the target words from Experiment 1were overall equally frequent as nouns and verbs, severalitems showed strong preferences for one part-of-speech.Furthermore, some trials had greater inter-rater vari-ability than others. Thus, we constructed a new set oftargets, keeping the phonologically distinct but equi-bi-ased targets from Experiment 1 (N = 13) and selecting17 new ones. In the new set, all the noun/verb alternateswere morphologically related. The overall mean log fre-quency of the targets was 1.12 occurrences per million asnouns and 1.02 as verbs. Three items marked the part-of-speech alternation with a voicing alternation, threewith a secondary stress shift and twenty-four with a pri-mary stress shift (see Appendix B).

Primes consisted of thirty abstract nouns, thirtystate-denoting adjectives and single letters for the base-line condition. The mean concreteness score for ournoun primes was 344 with no score exceeding 387 (Colt-heart, 1981; see Peterson, Burgess, Dell, & Eberhard,2001 for a similar criterion for identifying abstractnouns). Unique class membership was again determinedby entries in Francis and Kucera (1982). When an itemwas not present in the former, the CELEX database(Baayen et al., 1995) was consulted. Words with a

Fig. 2. Proportion of noun pronunciations in three primeconditions.


reported frequency of less than 1 per million in the unin-tended part-of-speech were considered unambiguous(a more conservative criterion than was used in Experi-ment 1). In this study, three prime words did not quitesatisfy this criterion but were still strongly biasedtowards the intended category. Each target was pairedwith one prime from each set. Examples of prime-targetpairs for the three conditions are given in (2). All primesin this study were monosyllabic. Primes shared no ortho-graphic, phonological or semantic content with the tar-get words. The noun and adjective conditions werematched for frequency of occurrence (Francis & Kucera,1982) and degree of imageability (Coltheart, 1981). As inExperiment 1, phonological characteristics common toone part-of-speech were equally represented in bothprime sets (Kelly, 1992; Monaghan et al., 2005).

Items were counter balanced across three presenta-tion lists. As in Experiment 1, participants saw each tar-get word once paired with one of the three possibleprime items. Filler item pairs were the same as forExperiment 1.

(2)

TableAnal

Effec

PrimLineaQuad

* p** p

TRUTH – CONFLICT

2ysis of variance summary for Exp

t By par

df

e type 2, 80r trend 1, 40ratic trend 1, 40

< .05.< .01.

abstract noun prime

BRIGHT – CONFLICT
adjective prime
D – CONFLICT
letter prime
Procedure

The experimental procedure was the same as forExperiment 1.


For data from five participants, it was only possiblefor one rater to perform the classification. For theremaining 37 participants, inter-rater agreement was86%. (Four items (misuse, export, insult, andprotest),whose phonological distinctions were not as strong asthe other items, accounted for 35% of rater mismatches.)Trials for which the raters did not agree were excludedfrom the analysis, as were all error trials. In total 14%of trials were excluded, leaving 1109 valid trials to beconsidered for the analysis.

eriment 2

ticipants (F1)

F1 MSE d

3.23* .032 2,0.31 .042 1,8.67* .023 1,

Fig. 2 presents the untransformed proportion ofnoun responses in the three prime conditions. Resultsfrom the statistical analysis including the factor PrimeType (Abstract Noun, Adjective and Letter) are present-ed in Table 2. As in Experiment 1, we again observe asignificant main effect of Prime Type. Ambiguous targetswere produced with noun pronunciations more oftenfollowing noun primes than following letter controls,Mdiff = .07, CI= ± .043. However, contrary to the pat-tern produced by verb primes, targets preceded by adjec-tive primes were named with more noun pronunciationsthan when preceded by letter primes, Mdiff = .06,CI= ± .035. Proportions of noun pronunciations fol-lowing noun and adjective primes did not differ fromone another, Mdiff = .015, CI= ± .046. The linear trendanalysis in which the baseline is predicted to elicit anintermediate proportion of noun pronunciations com-pared to the noun and adjective prime conditions wasnot significant while the quadratic equation did fit thedata.

In Experiment 2, we again find that speakers are sig-nificantly more likely to produce a noun following anoun compared to the neutral baseline. This was founddespite the fact that we used semantically non-prototyp-ical abstract nouns Speakers also produced morenouns following state-denoting adjectives than following

By items (F2) Min F 0

f F2 MSE df Min F 0

58 3.12* .042 2, 134 1.5829 0.15 .066 1, 55 0.1029 7.89** .022 1, 66 4.13*


single letters. This runs counter to the predictions of asemantic locus for the priming effect observed in Exper-iment 1 and lends further support to the syntacticaccount.

Any semantic explanation of the persistence effectshould operate at the same level of abstractness orgenerality for both nouns and verbs. As abstractnouns successfully biased speakers to produce nounsin this study, a semantic explanation must assume thatpriming can operate over extremely abstract sharedsemantic features, such as a general notion of thing.A comparably abstract semantic notion that capturesthe entire class of verbs is eventuality, which is theunion of events and states (Bach, 1986). If noun prim-ing occurs at the abstract level of thing, then verbpriming at the same level of abstractness would pre-dict that eventuality-denoting concepts would biasspeakers to produce other eventualities. This is notwhat was observed; state-denoting adjectives failed tobias speakers to produce verbs. Rather, adjectiveprimes biased speakers to produce nouns as often asnoun primes did themselves.

Why do adjectives lead speakers to produce nounsrather than having no effect, since they differ in part-of-speech information? We suggest that the adjectiveprimes may be producing a syntagmatic effect ratherthan a paradigmatic effect. We will return to this issuein the General Discussion.

To be fully convinced that we have sufficientlyteased semantics and syntax apart, we need to makeone more comparison. In Experiment 1 we showedthat event-denoting verbs biased speakers to produceevent-denoting verbs. In Experiment 2, we showedthat state-denoting adjectives did not lead speakersto produce verbs but rather nouns. Since state-denot-ing adjective primes hold the same semantic relation-ship to the event-denoting verb targets as theabstract noun primes hold to the target nouns, weargue that the results speak against the semantic locusof the persistence effect. To make sure that theabsence of priming of verbs by adjectives is due tothe fact that they do not share part-of-speech informa-tion, we must determine what naming behavior state-denoting verbs evoke for our ambiguous targets. Ifstate-denoting verbs do not evoke verbs, it would sug-gest that the absence of a priming effect for adjectiveprimes in Experiment 2 might be due to factors otherthan part-of-speech dissimilarity. Demonstrating averb biasing effect of state-denoting verbs is alsoimportant since the adjective primes clearly did inducean effect, but one which appears to be different in nat-ure from the part-of-speech effect under investigationhere. The adjective condition could have consisted oftwo separate effects, one semantic effect arising fromthe shared features denoting eventualities and a secondsyntagmatic effect. In other words, the semantic prim-

ing effect due to the shared semantic features couldhave been washed out by a counteracting syntagmaticeffect. Experiment 3, which uses stative verbs ratherthan eventive verbs or stative adjectives, addressesboth of these points.

Experiment 3

This experiment tests whether stative verbs, such asknow and exist, produce the same persistence effect thateventive verbs produced in Experiment 1.

Method

Participants

Forty-eight undergraduates from the University atBuffalo, State University of New York received partialcourse credit for their participation.

Materials

The same thirty category-ambiguous targets fromExperiment 2 were used. Each target was paired withan abstract noun, a stative verb, and a letter prime.The mean concreteness score for the set of abstract nounprimes was 414 (Coltheart, 1981). Stative verbs weredefined as verbs that could not occur in the progressive(Dowty, 1979). Examples of prime-target pairs for thethree conditions are given in (3). The set of stative verbsin English is much smaller than the set of eventive verbsand, given the productivity of zero derivation in English,finding unambiguous stative verbs was difficult. Thus, aset of ten unambiguous or strongly frequency biased sta-tive verbs was selected and then ten frequency andlength matched unambiguous abstract nouns werefound (Francis & Kucera, 1982). With the exception ofequal, which has a comparably frequent noun usageand own, which is homophonous with the pronoun,the verb primes respected the same constraints imposedfor Experiment 2. The noun primes also respected thisconstraint, but future additionally has an alternativeusage as an adjective. In both sets of prime words, fiveprimes are monosyllabic, three are disyllabic and twoare trisyllabic. In the verb primes, three of the multisyl-labic primes had second syllable stress, which is similarto the dominant pattern exhibited by targets when pro-duced as verbs. Primes were again unrelated to targetsand phonological cues to part-of-speech were controlled(Kelly, 1992). The letter control condition was againincluded to provide a neutral baseline. Items were dis-tributed across three presentation lists, each of whichcontained a unique pairing of prime with target. Thelists contained all targets and all primes and differedonly in which prime was paired with which target word.Filler items were the same as in the prior twoexperiments.

FAC


(3)
SEEV – R
Fig. 3. Propoconditions.

T – REBEL

rtion of noun pronunci

abstract noun prime

– REBEL
stative verb prime
EBEL
letter control prime
Procedure

The procedure was the same as in Experiment 1 and 2.


Inter-rater agreement was 95.6% in this experiment.Trials for which the raters did not agree were excludedfrom the analysis, as were all error trials. In addition,due to a technical error, response data for one item werelost. Less than 10% of responses were treated as errors,leaving 1178 valid trials for the analysis.

Fig. 3 presents the untransformed proportion ofnoun pronunciations in the three prime conditions.Results from the statistical analysis including the factorPrime Type (Abstract Noun, Stative Verb, and Letter)are presented in Table 3.

Once again, we observed a significant main effect ofPrime Type. Targets preceded by abstract noun primeswere pronounced as nouns more often than when pre-ceded by stative verb primes, Mdiff = .096,CI= ± .044. Targets preceded by verb primes were pro-nounced as nouns marginally less often than when pre-ceded by letter primes, Mdiff = .06, CI= ± .046. Thedifference in the proportion of noun pronunciations fol-lowing noun primes compared to the baseline letter con-dition was in the predicted direction but was notsignificant, Mdiff = .037, CI= ± .042.

Although not all the graded differences are robustenough to produce significant effects in the compari-sons, the linear trend contrast is significant while the

ations in three prime

quadratic contrast does not fit the data, which suggeststhat we did observe a monotonic decrease in the propor-tion of noun pronunciations produced as we progressedfrom the noun condition to the control condition and onto the stative verb condition. Furthermore, the effect sizefor the factor Prime Type is estimated to be h2

p = .083,which is comparable to the effects observed in Experi-ment 1, h2

p = .110, and Experiment 2, h2p = .082.

We again find that speakers are more likely to pro-duce a noun following an abstract noun compared tothe neutral base line. Speakers also produced fewernouns following stative verbs than following single let-ters. Thus, verbs that are semantically similar to the sta-tive adjectives used in Experiment 2 produced verydifferent behavior. This finding again runs counter tothe predictions of a semantic locus of the priming effectobserved in Experiment 1 and lends further support tothe syntactic account.

Viewing the results across the three experiments, weobserve no support for the semantic locus of the part-of-speech priming effect. However, it should be notedthat we did not explicitly manipulate the semantic dis-tance between primes and targets. An additional predic-tion of the semantic account for the persistence effect is astrong negative correlation between semantic distanceand priming magnitude. Specifically, we would expectthat as the semantic distance between prime and targetdecreases, the priming magnitude should increase. Totest this prediction, we calculated semantic distancebetween noun and verb primes and their paired targets.We calculated the jcn similarity measure (Jiang & Con-rath, 1997) following procedures outlined in Pedersen,Patwardhan, and Michelizzi (2004). (Several WordNetbased measures of semantic distance were evaluated byBudanitsky & Hirst (2001) and the jcn was found toout-perform other measures.) We then tested for an asso-ciation between semantic distance and the magnitude ofthe persistence effect observed for each individual prime-target pair (namely, Noun – Letter, on the one hand andLetter – Verb, on the other). Contrary to the predictionsof the semantic explanation for the persistence effect, nocorrelation was found between the magnitude of the per-sistence effect and semantic distance between a nounprime and noun target, Pearson’s r (N = 86) = .006,p > .5., or between verb primes and verb targets, Pear-son’s r (N = 56) = .024, p > .5. The absence of any cor-relation further supports the view that commonsyntactic features underlie the observed priming effect.

General discussion

The main goal of the present study was to investigatewhether the activation levels of part-of-speech represen-tations can influence on-going lexical selection processeseven when they are not part of a larger phrasal context.

Table 3Analysis of variance summary for Experiment 3

Effect By participants (F1) By items (F2) Min F 0

df F1 MSE df F2 MSE df Min F 0

Prime type 2, 94 4.28* .044 2, 56 3.42* .047 2, 131 1.90Linear trend 1, 47 10.69** .033 1, 28 5.75* .056 1, 56 3.73�

Quadratic trend 1, 47 0.49 .056 1, 28 0.01 .038 1, 29 0.00

* p < .05.** p < .01.� p < .06.


To that end, we compared naming, or pronunciationpreferences, for orthographically ambiguous but phono-logically distinct English words. The findings fromExperiment 1 demonstrate that unambiguous primescan influence speakers’ subsequent selection of part-of-speech features for ambiguous words. Speakers’ pronun-ciation preferences were sensitive to the part-of-speechof the prime word and, counter to the prediction of asyntagmatic influence, speakers produced the samepart-of-speech as the prime rather than a contrastingpart-of-speech that could form a syntactic string. Thisresult suggests that part-of-speech information is sharedacross lexical entries and that feature selection is sensi-tive to activation levels. In other words, this result dem-onstrates that part-of-speech features are primeable.More importantly, the results suggest that the activationlevel of the part-of-speech features can have a directinfluence on lexical selection processes.

The subsequent two studies aimed to distinguishbetween two possible explanations for the priming effect,a syntactic explanation and a semantic explanation.Since part-of-speech information is highly correlatedwith semantic features, the tendency to repeat the cate-gory of the prime when naming ambiguous words couldbe due to the repeated activation of syntactic featuresshared throughout the lexicon or to the repeated activa-tion of semantic features that correlate with the syntacticfeatures such as object, which is a common feature ofnouns, or event which is a common feature of verbs.To address this point, in Experiment 2 verb primes werereplaced by adjectives to remove the syntactic overlapwhile maintaining the semantic relationship; in the sameexperiment, concrete noun primes were replaced withabstract nouns in order to see if priming was affectedby the fact that prime and targets did not necessarilydenote the same kind of entity. Despite the reducedsemantic typicality of our noun primes in Experiment 2compared to Experiment 1, the priming effect in thenoun prime condition was still obtained. Furthermore,we observed no reduction in the tendency for abstractnoun primes to bias speakers to produce the noun vari-ant of the ambiguous target, a result not consonant witha semantic explanation. The semantic explanation also

predicted that adjectives would bias speakers to produceverbs, as verbs and adjectives both denote eventualities.However, rather than producing a paradigmatic effectcomparable to the one observed from verb primes inExperiment 1, adjectives produced a syntagmatic bias:speakers were biased to produce nouns following adjec-tives rather than verbs. Given that adjectives and verbsshare a similar set of semantic characteristics, the seman-tic explanation cannot account for this pattern of resultseither. However, the syntactic explanation also did notpredict that adjectives should bias speakers to producenouns.

We interpret the effect of the adjective primes as aris-ing from a completely different source, namely the com-binatory processes discussed in the introduction. Innormal language processing, words are encountered insyntactic contexts and the syntactic processor generatessyntagmatic expectations for what sort of words arelikely to come next (cf. Altmann & Kamide, 1999). Giv-en the absence of a syntactic context in our study, andthe need to commit to a part-of-speech in order to gen-erate a pronunciation, our procedure allows for theemergence of paradigmatic category effects. However,when the prime word is an adjective, the category fea-ture that is activated is not appropriate for the target.In this case, the syntagmatic expectation for nouns tofollow adjectives provides the noun pronunciation witha slight edge in the race for selection. Thus, althoughthe influence of adjectives appears similar to the influ-ence of nouns on the surface, we suggest that in factthe effect is quite different in nature.

In Experiment 3 we again observed an effect of part-of-speech information using stative verbs, which sharethe same semantic characteristics with target verbs asthe state-denoting adjectives used in Experiment 2.Rather than finding a syntagmatic effect analogous tothat obtained with adjectives, we again observed a par-adigmatic part-of-speech effect. Given that adjectivesand state-denoting verbs both share the same semanticcharacteristics with the target verbs, the semantic expla-nation cannot account for the set of results presentedacross the three experiments. Rather, the pattern ofresults is predicted by the syntactic explanation. Nouns,


both concrete and abstract, bias speakers to produceother nouns. Verbs, both eventive and stative, biasspeakers to produce other verbs. Furthermore, we foundno correlation between the semantic distance betweenprime and target and the magnitude of the primingeffect. Taken together, the results strongly support theproposal that the observed shift in naming bias is drivenby residual activation of part-of-speech features whichare distributed across representations in the mental lex-icon rather than due to semantic similarity or contextualrestrictions that call on the category information. Theseresults provide one of the first demonstrations that syn-tactic features can influence lexical processing in theabsence of concomitant combinatory processes.

As noted above, we tried to select primes that weretruly part-of-speech unambiguous. However, given theproductivity of zero derivation in English and the num-ber of other constraints on prime selection, we found itnecessary to make some compromises, as described inthe respective materials sections. It is possible that thiscompromise may have weakened the overall primingeffect, especially in Experiment 1. However, correlationsbetween priming magnitude and the frequency of aprime word in the non-intended part-of-speech provednon-significant, even when taken across all experiments,Pearson’s r = .004, p > .5. There were also too few items(N = 12 in the verb condition, N = 9 in the noun condi-tion and N = 5 in the adjective condition) to examine themain effect of Prime Type for only those target wordsthat were paired with ambiguous primes. Thus, we findno clear evidence to suggest that our compromise weak-ened the effects, although it does follow from our argu-ment that, if the primes were only weakly biased towardsone part-of-speech, our effects should be reduced. Itseems, however, that the relatively weak accessibilityof the alternative part-of-speech for this small subsetof primes was not sufficient to modulate the primingeffects.

Locus of the effects

The results from this study quite clearly demonstratethe influence of part-of-speech on lexical selection pro-cesses, but the underlying mechanism responsible forthe effect is less clear. There are two very different possi-ble loci for the effect, each assuming different mecha-nisms and each with very different theoreticalramifications.

On the one hand, the observed priming effect couldarise during the recognition of the visual stimulus. Thepreponderance of evidence suggests that all meaningsof an ambiguous word are initially activated (Onifer &Swinney, 1981; Swinney, 1979) and the dominant mean-ing is retrieved first (Hogaboam & Perfetti, 1975; Simp-son, 1981). While some semantically biasing sententialcontexts have been shown to affect the initial activation

of a non-dominant meaning of a homograph (Tabossi,1988; Tabossi, Colombo, & Job, 1987), strongly con-strained syntactic contexts have not been shown to havethe same influence on early lexical recognition processes(Onifer & Swinney, 1981; Seidenberg et al., 1982; Swin-ney, 1979; Tanenhaus et al., 1979). For example, Tanen-haus and colleagues found that both the noun and verbmeanings of rose are initially activated despite stronglybiasing sentential contexts such as ‘they bought a rose’and ‘they all rose’. A critical difference between priorstudies and the current one is that we were not expectingour manipulation to eliminate or dampen the activationof one syntactic alternate of the ambiguous targets.Rather, we were interested in which alternative part-of-speech category is eventually selected. In the absenceof a strongly biasing semantic or syntactic context or astrong meaning dominance asymmetry for the ambigu-ous target words, we can assume that both the nounand verb meanings of the targets were initially activated.Since the frequency of the targets in the two parts-of-speech was matched, the race for selection of one ofthe two meanings should have been closer than in moststudies investigating homograph recognition. In a veryclose race, even a slight advantage can make all the dif-ference. Thus, when participants were reading theambiguous targets in the present experiments, the prioractivation of the primed part-of-speech category featuremay have sufficed to provide the slight edge that madethe difference between selecting the noun or verb. Thus,assuming that the noun and verb features receive thesame amount of activation from the (equibiased) targetstimulus, the primed feature will be slightly more acti-vated due to the residual activation remaining in the sys-tem. The greater activation of the primed feature willrender it more likely that the output of lexical access isconsistent with the prime.

This explanation hinges on a model of syntactic fea-ture representation in which words that share syntacticfeatures have overlapping syntactic representations.Such a model is widely accepted in psycholinguistics(cf. Caramazza, 1997; Dell, 1986; Gaskell & Marslen-Wilson, 1997; Levelt et al., 1999), is similar to proposalsin the linguistics literature (cf. Koenig, 1999; Pollard &Sag, 1987, 1994), and is analogous to distributed andshared representations in models of semantic memory(e.g., Collins & Loftus, 1975). The explanation alsohinges on a degree of interactivity within the model,such that activation levels of syntactic representationscan feedback through the system to impact the initialmapping of orthography onto phonology. While wordrecognition models rarely make explicit claims abouthow syntactic information is represented (see Gaskell& Marslen-Wilson, 1997 for an example of a word rec-ognition model that assumes that syntactic and semanticinformation are represented in a similar fashion), suchan extension of these models is in line with modern


linguistic views of how lexical information is organized(see Pollard & Sag, 1994, for example) and does notrequire extensive modifications or additions.

On the other hand, the categorial persistence effectscould arise during lexical selection for production. Asmentioned above, in the initial stages of word recognitionboth meanings of homographs are activated. In the isolat-ed contexts of single word recognition, it is not clear that acommitment is made to one of two equally plausible inter-pretations. Indeed, upon reading an unbiased word like‘fly’, one is unsure whether the word refers to the insector the act of moving through the air. For homonyms, par-ticipants can name the word without committing to oneinterpretation. However, for the phonologically ambigu-ous target words used in the present study, the namingtask requires a commitment. Thus, the influence couldbe on the side of preparing the naming response, whichwould rest within the language production system. Theproduction system must select between the two syntacticoptions activated during recognition.

Localizing the part-of-speech priming effect withinextant models of word production may require some sig-nificant extensions. Most models of word productionisolate syntactic information from phonological andsemantic sources of information (Caramazza, 1997;Levelt et al., 1999; Dell, 1986). For some, activation lev-els of syntactic features cannot influence the outcome oflexical selection processes either because the flow of acti-vation is uni-directional (Levelt et al., 1999) or becausethe selection of syntactic features is automatic and fol-lows commitment to a wordform (Caramazza, 1997;Caramazza & Miozzo, 1997). The present results, how-ever, suggest that activated part-of-speech category fea-tures affect lexical selection and that the flow ofactivation between part-of-speech category featuresand lemma/wordform representations may therefore bebi-directional. Such bi-directional links are consistentwith interactive models of lexical selection (e.g., Dell,1986; see Vigliocco & Hartsuiker, 2002, for a discussionof bi-directional links at different levels of representationin production).

Unfortunately, discriminating between a comprehen-sion and production locus of the part-of-speech effects isnot possible with the present study. Further researchmust be conducted to determine which system underpinsthe observed effects. Nevertheless, at a minimum thepresent study demonstrates that part-of-speech categoryfeatures can influence lexical processes in the absence ofconcomitant syntactic combinatory processes.

Relation to existing models

As discussed in the introduction, Cubelli et al. (2005)found gender congruency effects in bare noun naming inItalian. Contrary to the typical gender congruencyeffects found during noun phrase naming, Cubelli et al.

found slower naming times when the distractor wordhad the same grammatical gender as the picture name.To account for this pattern of results, they proposed adouble selection model in which the grammatical infor-mation associated with the selected lemma and the dis-tractor word compete for selection; when the targetand distractor word have similar grammatical featuresmore competition between the features is produced. Inother word, according to their model, two masculinelemmas do not converge on a single syntactic featurefor gender. This is a fundamental difference betweentheir proposal and the present proposal. We argue thatour priming effects arise because all words of a particu-lar part-of-speech share a single syntactic feature. Thus,we would not expect competition between two identicalsyntactic features, as Cubelli et al. suggest, and such amodel does not account for our results.

The model proposed by Cubelli et al. (2005) is similarto the one we advocate, however, in that both modelsimplicate syntactic features in single word productionif the phonological form of the to-be-produced word isdependent on the selection of a particular syntactic fea-ture. Cubelli et al. suggest that syntactic features directlyaccess inflectional morphemes, particularly gendermarking inflections in Italian. Our study demonstratesthat the influence of syntactic features is not restrictedto the selection of inflectional forms but can also havea direct impact on the semantically-driven process of lex-ical selection.

As discussed above, one important implication ofincluding bi-directional links between syntactic fea-tures and lexical items is that it supports syntax-drivenmodels of lexical access. One way in which grammat-ical information could be relevant to lexical retrievalin the context of larger syntactic units is that theunfolding syntactic tree could then influence subse-quent lexical selection procedures. This amounts tothe type of syntagmatic effect discussed above. Specif-ically, if a speaker knows he wants to produce a nounphrase, then the appropriate syntactic frame couldactivate the grammatical information consistent withnouns, which would then activate all nouns in the lex-icon. Which specific noun is intended would of coursebe determined by activation from the conceptual level.Thus, the results presented here provide supportingevidence for models of sentence production in whichlexical selection is partly driven by semantic demandsand partly driven by syntactic demands, as suggestedby Dell and colleagues (Dell, 1986; Gordon & Dell,2003).

At the outset of this study we proposed that lexicalentries consist of phonological, syntactic, and semantictriples of information. Our results suggest that somesyntactic features, namely immutable inherent charac-teristics of words such as part-of-speech, are more simi-lar to phonological and semantic features than prior


studies may have suggested. We have proposed that syn-tactic features can influence lexical processing if the fea-ture is needed to encode the relevant utterance. Whilesyntactic features are most often needed for combinato-ry, syntagmatic, processes rather than for lexical pro-cesses, our results show that if lexical processes also

A

need to make use of a syntactic feature, then its influencecan be observed even for single word utterances. Finally,the results add to our knowledge of lexical organization,suggesting that lexical knowledge is organized paradig-matically along the syntactic dimension of part-of-speech category.

Appendix A

Experimental materials for Experiment 1

Log f Log f
NOUN PRIMES VERB PRIMES TARGETS millio
amillio

Log fmillio

a

requency pern of targetss nouns

Log fmillio

requency pern of targets

as verbs

BARN
ADMIRE DELEGATE 1.21 0.43 BREEZE FRUSTRATE DISCHARGE 0.90 0.95 STREET GROW CONSTRUCT 0.30 1.46 CHILD WRITE USE 2.37 2.97 BRICK BLESS TEAR 1.79 1.79 CAR TAKE INCREASE 1.83 2.36 PRIEST BOTHER REBEL 0.98 0.86 CAT BEG DISCOUNT 0.75 0.69 CHAIR JOIN ADVOCATE 0.97 1.15 MATH BLINK ESTIMATE 1.43 1.53 COMPANY TELL PROTEST 1.59 1.41 DAGGER HEAL ABUSE 1.23 0.83 PERSON CLOSE ATTRIBUTE 1.04 0 HAIR SUFFER WIND 2.08 1.24 HAT POUR BOW 1.27 1.27 FOOD LEARN INSULT 1.14 1.01 JUNGLE DINE TORMENT 0.73 0.91 AFTERNOON LISTEN EXCUSE 1.45 1.28 BASKET PRAISE DESERT 1.61 1.27 MONEY SEND CONVICT 0.24 1.00 MONEY* READ CONFINE 0.54 1.38 TRUNK ROB CONDUCT 1.19 1.58 THORN ADORN RECORD 1.97 1.72 SONG EAT ALLY 1.40 0.71 SONG* TEACH COMPOUND 1.27 0.88 PAPER DRAW INCENSE 0.64 0.29 BOOTH PUNISH DIGEST 0 0.93 TREE SPEND DOVE 0.69 0 MEAL WARN IMPORT 1.28 1.32 WRIST BAKE CONVERSE 0 0.61
*Due to experimenter error, two noun primes were repeated with two different targets in two different lists.

Appendix B


ABSTRACT NOUNS
DJECTIVES TARGETS requency pern of targetss nouns

as verbs

SALE
RARE MISUSE 0.55 0.19 TRUTH STRONG EXTRACT 0.93 1.22 SKILL FRESH CONTEST 1.06 0.69 ROLE RAW IMPORT 1.28 1.32


Appendix B (continued)

A Log f Log f
ABSTRACT NOUNS DJECTIVES TARGETS millio
amillio

requency pern of targetss nouns


as verbs

WEEK
BAD CONTRAST 1.63 1.00 CRIME BROAD DELEGATE 1.21 0.43 GREED BLAND INSULT 1.14 1.01 THEME TIGHT CONVICT 0.24 1.00 STRENGTH STRANGE ESTIMATE 1.43 1.53 GRIEF DENSE REBEL 0.98 0.86 LIFE DEAD PROGRESS 1.81 1.22 THREAT BRIGHT ADVOCATE 0.97 1.15 DEATH SMALL CONDUCT 1.19 1.58 FRAUD BLEAK COMMUNE 0.99 0 HAT HOT EXPORT 1.36 1.01 LAW NEW CONVERT 0.55 1.55 TALE NEAT EXCUSE 1.45 1.28 WOE SAD PRODUCE 0.91 2.39 MYTH MAD PROJECT 1.81 1.22 LUCK PURE REFUND 0.11 0 PEACE GREAT OBJECT 2.02 1.39 HEIR COY IMPRINT 0.40 0.59 WEALTH STRICT ABUSE 1.23 0.83 SOUL SOFT RECORD 1.97 1.72 GHOST HARSH COMPRESS 0 0.99 TERM TALL CONFINES 0.54 0 FACT FULL CONFLICT 1.75 0.69 YEAR HIGH GRADUATE 1.22 1.11 TRANCE HOARSE IMPLANTS 0 0.53 LOSS LATE PROTEST 1.59 1.41
*Due to experimenter error, one concrete noun was included in the set of abstract nouns.

Appendix C


ABSTRACT NOUNS
STATIVE VERBS TARGETS
OFFICE
KNOW MISUSE WEALTH UNDERSTAND EXTRACT WEEK OWN CONTEST YEAR SEEM IMPORT FACT SEE REBEL LIFE EXIST CONVICT MUSIC EQUAL DELEGATE FUTURE FORGET ESTIMATE POLICY REMEMBER CONTRAST FAMILY OWE INSULT WEEK OWN CONDUCT FAMILY UNDERSTAND CONVERT YEAR SEEM COMMUNE MUSIC EQUAL EXCUSE POLICY REMEMBER EXPORT FUTURE FORGET ADVOCATE LIFE EXIST PRODUCE FACT KNOW PROGRESS WEALTH OWE PROJECT OFFICE SEE REFUND FAMILY OWN CONFLICT MUSIC FORGET ABUSE
Appendix C (continued)

ABSTRACT NOUNS
STATIVE VERBS TARGETS
FACT
KNOW OBJECT OFFICE EQUAL GRADUATE FUTURE OWE IMPLANTS POLICY REMEMBER COMPRESS LIFE SEE PROTEST WEEK UNDERSTAND CONFINES YEAR SEEM RECORD WEALTH EXIST IMPRINT
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