School of Psychology

Repetition Priming In Sentence Comprehension - Summary 2008

Supervisor:                  Dr Jeff Coney

Date:                           10th June, 2008

The present study sought to investigate sentence comprehension in the brain, with regard to the thorough and exhaustive lexical activation pattern of words in a sentence using an online cross-modal lexical repetition priming paradigm. Possible differences in activation pattern between three grammatical categories – Subject, Verb and Object were also explored. 36 university students were presented with 240 auditory sentence stimuli across two sessions. A repeated measures ANOVA was used analyse the three grammatical categories separately for the purposes of the study. The present study not only showed that words presented in a sentential context evoked the same robust facilitation effects that have been documented in the literature, but, more importantly, that this lexical activation was found to endure at high levels throughout the period of the sentence stimuli. The relativity of Subject, Verb, and Object was also investigated. Future implications included the analytic investigation of lexical activation of other word functions in sentences, such as anaphors. Additionally, lexical decay pattern with regard to working memory should also be investigated.