Inequality between the classes: Phonological and distributional typicality as predictors of lexical processing

Information about the syntactic category of a word can be derived from a number of complementary sources. We focus here on phonological and distributional cues for distinguishing nouns and verbs that have been proposed as useful for language acquisition. In this paper we assessed the extent to which this information affects lexical processing in adults. We hypothesised that the phonological or distributional typicality of a word with respect to its syntactic class would influence lexical access – words that were more typical of their class would be accessed more quickly. We tested this in three tasks: naming, lexical decision, and a noun/verb decision task. Words that were phonologically typical of their syntactic category were responded to more quickly in lexical decision and naming tasks. Distributional typicality related only to the noun/verb decision task.