Expectancy for the Morphological Form of Verbs During Semantic Priming

We examined whether event knowledge about the roles that nouns play in specific events interacts with the morphological form of active and passive verbs during short SOA (250 ms), noun-verb semantic priming. In Experiment 1, we investigated how quickly participants pronounce verbs inflected with -ing or -ed (arresting vs. arrested) when preceded by primes consisting of a good-agent or a goodpatient and the auxiliary was (cop was vs. crook was). In Experiment 2, the primes included the determiner The, and participants made lexical decisions to the same target verbs. In both experiments, participants responded more quickly to active verbs, and made more pronunciation errors in Experiment 1, when preceded by good-agent, rather than good-patient noun primes. Alternatively, response latencies and errors for passive verbs were similar regardless of noun type.