Word-context effects in word naming and lexical decision

Stanovich and West (1983; West and Stanovich, 1982) demonstrated that lexical decisions to target words preceded by incongruous sentence contexts are inhibited more by these contexts than are naming responses to the same target words. They argued that this difference between the two tasks was due to post-lexical processing at the message level that is effective only in the lexical-decision task. The operations of the mechanism thought to underlie this post-lexical effect also predict that, under certain circumstances, the processing of target words congruous with the sentence context should be facilitated more in lexical decision than in naming. The present naming study together with an earlier lexical-decision study tested and confirmed this prediction for word targets following word contexts. The stimulus-onset asynchrony of context word and target word was also varied. This manipulation clearly affected the magnitude of facilitation, indicating that context-induced attentional processing can facilitate lexical access in word-context studies.