Testing the automaticity of syntax using masked visual priming

Language comprehension proceeds at a very fast pace. It is argued that context influences the speed of language by providing informative cues. How syntactic contextual information processing incoming words is, however, less known. Here we employed masked priming paradigm in four behavioural experiments German to test whether primes automatically influence categorisation nouns and verbs. We found robust effects with but only when verbs were morpho-syntactically marked. Furthermore, that, compared baseline, slow down target relationship between prime syntactically incorrect, rather than speeding it up correct. This argues favour an inhibitory nature priming. Overall, data indicate humans extract features from guide analysis during online processing.