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

This paper presents three naming experiments designed to investigate whether the activation levels of syntactic features associated with lexical items, specifically part-of-speech information, can influence lexical processes. Naming preferences for orthographically ambiguous but phonologically distinct English nouns and verbs, such as convict (CONvict_n vs. conVICT_v) were compared. In Experiment 1, ambiguous target words were preceded by unambiguous noun, verb, and letter (control) primes. Experiments 2 and 3 were designed to distinguish whether the priming effects observed in Experiment 1 have a syntactic or a semantic locus. In all three experiments, we found an influence of the part-of-speech of the prime on speakers' naming preferences for the target. The results support a model of the lexicon in which part-of-speech information can influence lexical processes.