Summary
An experiment was conducted in the Serbo-Croatian language in which native speakers/readers made lexical decisions on inflected nouns and legally inflected pseudonouns following inflected possessive pronouns. A possessive pronoun and the noun or pseudonoun that followed it could agree in case, gender, and number (0 violations), disagree in either case or gender or number (1 violation) or disagree simultaneously on two of the three (2 violations). A grammatical congruency effect was observed for both nouns and pseudonouns. Acceptance latencies were shorter and rejection latencies were longer for inflectional agreement than inflectional disagreement. However, for neither nouns nor pseudonouns was the magnitude of the effect influenced by the type or number of violations. The results are discussed in terms of (1) the automaticity of syntactic processes and (2) the properties of a decision making device (specially tailored to rapid lexical evaluations) relative to the properties of the language processor.
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This research was supported in part by NICHD Grants HD-08495 and HD-01994 to the University of Belgrade and Haskins Laboratories, respectively
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Lukatela, G., Kostić, A., Todorović, D. et al. Type and number of violations and the grammatical congruency effect in lexical decision. Psychol. Res 49, 37–43 (1987). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00309201
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00309201