Type and number of violations and the grammatical congruency effect in lexical decision.

A n experiment was conducted in the 5 erboCroatian 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 eithe1' 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 shorte1' and rejection latencies were longer f01' 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 disc1lSsed in terms of (1) the aldomaticity 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.