Quantifying contextual contributions to word-recognition processes.

The experiment reported here used the gating paradigm (Grosjean, 1980) to investigate the following issues: To test the validity of the claims made by the "cohort" theory (MarslenWilaon & Tyler, 1980; Marslen-Wilson & Welsh, 1978) for the interaction of sensory and contextual constraints during the process of recognizing spoken words, and to determine the relative contribution of two kinds of contextual constraint-syntactic and interpretative-in reducing the amount of sensory input needed for recognition. The results both provide good support for the cohort model, and show that although strong syntactic constraints on form-clam only marginally reduce the amount of sensory input needed, a minimal interpretative context has a sub. stantial facilitatory effect on word recognition.