Comprehension Strategies and Lexical Priming

Bever (1970) has proposed a number of strategies which can be applied during comprehension. According to one of these strategies, noun—verb—noun sequences are assumed to correspond to "actor—action—object." Using a sentence classification task, Experiment 1 provides evidence that such a strategy is indeed employed by adults. The results of Experiment 1, in conjunction with the data from a lexical decision task using the same materials (Experiment 2), also provide evidence that even weak semantic relations can produce substantial lexical priming effects during comprehension.