Haskins Publications

Number	576
Year	1987
Drawer	10
Entry Date	11/17/1999
Authors	Katz, L., Boyce, S., Goldstein, L. & Lukatela, G.
Contact
Publication	Cognition, 25, 235-263.
url	http://www.haskins.yale.edu/Reprints/HL0576.pdf
Abstract	Three lexical decision experiments were concerned with the separability of syntactic and semantic processing in spoken word perception. An additional experiment examined the problem of measuring reaction times to a spoken stimulus. Words in the Serbo-Croatian language were used; each stimulus consisted of a noun stem (which was either a meaningful root or a pseudoword stem) plus an inflectional suffix which conveyed information about the noun’s grammatical case. Speed of identifying the inflectionally related forms of a noun was a function of differences in their syntatic meanings rather than differences in their physical forms or their actual frequencies of occurence. In addition, identification of a noun was facilitated when it was preceded by a stimulus carrying predictive inflectional information whether that stimulus was a real adjective or pseudoadjective. The results echo previous findings for word perception in print and provide evidence of essential structural uniformity in the processing of inflection for both spoken and printed words. For both, there is evidence that inflectional processing is modular, at least to the extent that it is indepent from semantic processing for the initial portion of its time course.
Notes