Measuring lexical access during sentence processing

The results from “on-line” investigations of sentence comprehension are often difficult to interpret since it is not always apparent what component processes are reflected in the response measure. The results of two experiments reported here indicate that response latencies from phoneme-triggered lexical decision (PTLD) reflect the time needed for lexical access during sentence processing. Listeners were presented with sentences and were asked to make a word/nonword judgment for items beginning with a particular word-initial target phoneme. Speed of lexical access was manipulated by varying the semantic predictability of the target-bearing word. WORD judgments were faster for words that were preceded by semantically related verbs than were WORD judgments for words that were preceded by neutral verbs. The present results are consistent with other studies showing semantic facilitation of lexical access during the processing of fluent speech. It is argued that the phoneme-triggered lexical-decision task is a more suitable measure of lexical access during sentence processing than phoneme monitoring (Foss, 1969) or word monitoring (Marslen-Wilson & Tyler, 19751. In addition, it is pointed out that the phoneme-triggered lexical-decision task lends itself to modifications which should enable investigators to study various aspects of on-line sentence processing.