Object congruency, conceptual competition, and annulled repetition priming: The influence of sortal restrictions on object categorization in verbal contexts

In Härtl (2003)), it was shown that congruous pictures were size categorized – i.e. a conceptual task – slower than incongruous ones subsequent to a localization expression containing a prepositional phrase (as in to stick s.th. on the ...). No such difference showed up with the intransitive prepositional variants, i.e. particles as in to stick s.th. on. In the current study, transitive activity verbs of the type to smoke or to board, which in contrast to prepositions impose tight lexical sortal restrictions on potential direct objects, were used: Here, congruous objects are processed faster than incongruous objects. The difference between prepositions and verbs is associated with the rigorousness of the sortal restrictions and the corresponding quantity of entities that are conceptually activated with the verbs vs. prepositions: With spatial prepositions the set of potential arguments is much larger as compared to verbs of the type in question. This implies that with prepositions the conceptual suppression of prognostically activated entities, which is necessary to categorize the congruous object, inhibits processing. In contrast, with the activity verbs the definite sortal restrictions allow an immediate access to the relevant object properties. Crucially, this is supported by the finding that a repetition priming effect shows up with incongruous objects only: The system benefits from a repetition if no other type of priming intervenes processing. This suggests that sortal restrictions have an effect on processing earlier than a memorized object representation can be retrieved which was stored in the context of a conceptual categorization task. Abstract