Psychological Research (2013) 77:399–421
DOI 10.1007/s00426-012-0442-z
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Conditional automaticity in subliminal morphosyntactic priming
Ulrich Ansorge • Bert Reynvoet • Jessica Hendler
Lennart Oettl • Stefan Evert
•
Received: 30 September 2011 / Accepted: 24 May 2012 / Published online: 12 June 2012
Ó Springer-Verlag 2012
Abstract We used a gender-classification task to test the
principles of subliminal morphosyntactic priming. In
Experiment 1, masked, subliminal feminine or masculine
articles were used as primes. They preceded a visible target
noun. Subliminal articles either had a morphosyntactically
congruent or incongruent gender with the targets. In a
gender-classification task of the target nouns, subliminal
articles primed the responses: responses were faster in
congruent than incongruent conditions (Experiment 1). In
Experiment 2, we tested whether this congruence effect
depended on gender relevance. In line with a relevancedependence, the congruence effect only occurred in a
gender-classification task but was absent in another categorical discrimination of the target nouns (Experiment 2).
The congruence effect also depended on correct word
order. It was diminished when nouns preceded articles
(Experiment 3). Finally, the congruence effect was replicated with a larger set of targets but only for masculine
targets (Experiment 4). Results are discussed in light of
U. Ansorge (&)
Faculty of Psychology, University of Vienna, Liebiggasse 5,
1010 Vienna, Austria
e-mail: ulrich.ansorge@univie.ac.at
U. Ansorge J. Hendler L. Oettl
Institute of Cognitive Science, University of Osnabrueck,
Osnabrueck, Germany
B. Reynvoet
Department of Psychology, University of Leuven,
Leuven, Belgium
S. Evert
Institute of Comparative Linguistics and Literature Studies,
Technical University Darmstadt, Darmstadt, Germany
theories of subliminal priming in general and of subliminal
syntactic priming in particular.
Introduction
While hearing or reading language, syntactic and semantic
processes interactively determine comprehension: preceding words determine what to expect next and how to
comprehend a word. In many languages, such as German,
several words are syntactically polyvalent: they can take
on different syntactical functions, depending on how they
are used in the context of a sentence. In the German
language, for example, if presented before nouns, the
definite article for a nominative singular masculine noun,
‘der’ (as in ‘der Apfel ist rot’ meaning ‘the apple is red’),
is syntactically polyvalent. The reason is that ‘der’ can be
alternatively used as a genitive pronoun for masculine and
feminine singular and plural nouns (as in ‘abseits der
Straßen’ meaning ‘off roads’). Likewise, if presented
before a noun, the word ‘die’ can be used as a definite
article for the nominative case of a singular feminine
noun (as in ‘die Blume ist rot’ meaning ‘the flower is
red’). However, alternatively, ‘die’ could be used as the
definite article for the nominative case of the plural
feminine and masculine nouns (as in ‘die A¨pfel sind rot’
meaning ‘the apples are red’). In addition, if presented
after the nouns, the same words can again change their
syntactic function. However, after the nouns, the articles
‘die’ and ‘der’ could never serve as singular nominative
determiners for their preceding nouns. As a consequence
of grammatical polyvalence and the function of word
order for the specification of grammatical function, the
exact word sequence accounts for the syntactic function of
a determiner, and the determiner in turn suggests a
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particular expectancy for (and interpretation of) a subsequent word.
In line with the latter, after a definite feminine singular
article ‘die’, the reader expects to find a feminine singular
noun (or a plural noun). Violation of this expectation
delays the processing of the noun (Friedrici & Jacobsen,
1999). Theoretically, such a delay might reflect syntactic or
semantic processing. However, electrophysiological correlates suggested that it is a syntactic violation (Gunter,
Friederici, & Schriefers, 2000; Haagort & Brown, 1999).
To be precise, during gender priming with determiners, the
violation is morphosyntactic because the violation is based
on a non-fitting inflection of the determiner. [Otherwise
these conditions are syntactically appropriate (i.e., word
order is correct with the determiner preceding the noun).]
Current theoretical controversy concerns the degree of
automaticity of such morphosyntactic and syntactic processes, with some researchers arguing for automatic processing of syntactic (e.g., Flores d’Arcais, 1988; Forster,
1979) and morphosyntactic (e.g., Hasting & Kotz, 2008;
Koester, Gunter, & Wagner, 2007) structure while others
argue against this position (cf. Ayora, Janssen, Dell’Acqua,
& Alario, 2009; Dent, Johnston, & Humphreys, 2008;
Ferreira & Pashler, 2002; Fayol, Largie, & Lemiere, 1994).
One line of evidence that suggested that syntactical
processing is indeed an automatic process is its awarenessindependence. One characteristic of automatic processes is
their independence of awareness (Posner & Snyder, 1975),
and a number of studies suggested that this could also be
true of syntactic processing both, in patients (cf. Ferreira,
Bock, Wilson, & Cohen, 2008) and in healthy participants
(Sereno, 1991).
Consider the study by Sereno (1991): she presented
three visual words in a temporal sequence. The first and the
last words were clearly seen by her participants. However,
she assumed that forward and backward masking rendered
the second brief priming word (or prime) subliminal—that
is, the priming word seemed to have been presented below
the level of aware perception. In this context, masking
denotes the suppression of a brief visual stimulus (here: a
word) by preceding and subsequent visual stimuli at the
same location (Forster, 1998). Sereno used both syntactically congruent and incongruent masked primes and compared the performance between these conditions. In the
congruent condition, the masked prime word syntactically
fitted the word order of the sentence. For instance, a possessive determiner as a prime word (e.g., ‘your’) completed
a sequence consisting of a starting verb ‘hear’ (which also
served as a forward mask for the determiner, decreasing the
prime’s visibility) and a closing noun ‘world’ (working as a
backward mask for the prime) to form a syntactically
appropriate sentence like ‘hear your world’. In the syntactically incongruent condition, by contrast, the prime
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word did not fit the typical word order because the positions of verb and noun were reverted (e.g., ‘chain your
think’).1 In line with automatic syntactic processing,
Sereno found a congruence effect: a lexical decision about
the target’s status as a word or non-word was faster in
syntactically congruent than incongruent conditions.
Strong versus weak automaticity
So far, however, it is unclear exactly what kind of automaticity of word processing is reflected in subliminal syntactic
priming. Subliminal syntactic priming could be strongly
automatic or it could be weakly automatic (Kahneman &
Treisman, 1984). Strongly automatic effects are triggered by
the stimulus and are neither subject to intentions nor conditional upon intentions or task sets. A strongly automatic
processes runs off in an involuntary fashion, once a stimulus
is presented that triggers its fitting processes. By contrast,
weakly automatic effects can be at least intentionally suppressed. Also, some forms of weak automaticity might even
require a fitting intention on the side of the participant in the
first place. This latter conception has been denoted conditional automaticity (Bargh, 1992).
To start with the strongly automatic conceptions, one
strongly automatic way of how subliminal syntactic priming could be brought about is by spreading activation
within the mental lexicon (Kiefer, 2002; Marcel, 1983).
The mental lexicon is the memory for words and their
meanings. In the mental lexicon, each word’s meaning
could be represented as a node in a network of interconnected word nodes (Collins & Loftus, 1975; Neely, 1977).
In this network, the spatial proximity between nodes and/or
the strength of the interconnections is assumed to be proportional to the semantic relatedness of the words. In such
a network, a subliminal word could activate its corresponding node as well as other nodes with semantically
associated meaning via the spreading of activation along
the interconnections and proportional to them (Plaut &
Booth, 2000). To account for subliminal syntactic priming,
we would only need to assume that reciprocal node activation is also proportional to the syntactic fit between two
consecutive words. For instance, in the mental lexicon
words could be represented along with a list of syntactically defined roles that they could take on in a syntactically
1
It could be argued that even this syntactically incongruent sentence
was in fact syntactically congruent. However, these are original
example sequences from the study of Sereno. We preferred to take
this example because at least with these two sequences, the same
prime word ‘your’ was used in congruent and incongruent conditions.
This was not the case in many other instances of Sereno’s study in
which different prime words were used in congruent than incongruent
conditions.
Psychological Research (2013) 77:399–421
valid sentence (Bock, Loebell, & Morey, 1992). If these
roles also determine how closely connected two words of
different word forms (e.g., a noun and the article it could
take) are in the mental lexicon, it is conceivable that syntactic priming could be brought about by strongly automatic spreading activation triggered by subliminal words.
Related, strongly automatic syntactic priming could also
rely on the mental lexicon’s representations of asymmetric
syntagmatic word–word relations (cf. Kjellmer, 1991).
Some word pairs are temporally (in visual and auditory
verbal communication) or ‘left–right’ (in Western visual
scripture) asymmetric syntagmatic word–word relations
because one of two words (word x) more frequently precedes a second word (word y) than the other way round.
This is suggested by the collocation of words in text corpora (cf. Michelbacher, Evert, & Schütze, 2007). As an
example, take the collocation of the two words ‘Christmas
decorations’. This is an asymmetrical syntagmatic collocation: the word ‘Christmas’ is predictive of the subsequent
‘decorations’. Yet, the word ‘decorations’ is not predictive
of the preceding word ‘Christmas’. If asymmetric syntagmatic word–word representations determine the length and
strength of the connections between word representations
in the mental lexicon one word prime that is presented to
the participants and that has been frequently experienced to
precede one word target because the standard syntactical
order would be prime word before target word, the prime
could activate the representation of the word target in the
mental lexicon in a strongly automatic way, too.
However, a wealth of theories acknowledges the role of
intentions and top-down control in subliminal processing.
Some of these theories posit that subliminal processing
could be one source of cognitive control itself, thereby,
essentially denying the automatic nature of subliminal
processing altogether. A second theoretical position in this
camp would argue that subliminal processing is weakly
automatic. To start with the first of the two positions,
according to an elaborate-processing view humans process
subliminal words in a manner very similar to clearly visible
words (cf. Dehaene et al., 1998; Naccache & Dehaene,
2001; Reynvoet, Gevers, & Caessens, 2005). In fact,
defenders of an elaborate-processing view left open whether
or not subliminal stimuli would be able to elicit a new
intention or fitting willed behaviour in and by themselves
(cf. Van den Bussche & Reynvoet, 2007). Related to this,
some theories acknowledged top-down mediated influences
of context on subliminal processing (cf. Kiefer & Martens,
2010; Martens, Ansorge, & Kiefer, 2011; van Opstal,
Reynvoet, & Verguts, 2005).
According to an opposing view, subliminal processing in
general and masked priming in particular would be weakly
automatic and a conditionally automatic process (Bargh,
1992). This means that masked priming cannot elicit a
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fitting intention itself but, on the contrary, critically depends
on the prior setup of a top-down or goal-directed intention
before the processing of subliminal stimuli can take place.
Only once such an intention, goal, or task set has been
firmly established, a stimulus of which a person remains
unaware would be able to elicit a stimulus processing as this
would be implied by the current task settings (e.g., Ansorge
& Neumann, 2005; Kunde, Reuss, & Kiesel, 2012).
So far, top-down control over masked priming has been
demonstrated (or claimed) for motor activation (cf. Kunde,
Kiesel, & Hoffmann, 2003), for the direction of attention
(cf. Ansorge, Kiss, & Eimer, 2009), and for the selection of
task sets (Mattler, 2006). Mattler, for example, demonstrated that once a participant had set up a task set and knew
that a visual diamond indicated that s/he had to perform an
auditory task, a masked diamond was able to trigger an
expectation or task set for an auditory task, although the
participant was unaware of the diamond. Evidently, this sort
of priming effect of the diamond could only be brought
about by the top-down task settings that the participants
intentionally set up in the laboratory to comply with Mattler’s task. There is no connection between diamonds and
auditory tasks in the pre-experimental experience of the
participants that could equally explain why a masked diamond could trigger an auditory task-set preparation.
Theoretically, due to its top-down dependence, conditional automaticity provides a very plausible framework for
masked syntactic priming. On a theoretical level, conditional automaticity in the form of constraints imposed by
top-down intentions is akin to the constraining influence of
sequentially preceding words during language comprehension that disambiguates the potential syntactical role of a
syntactically polyvalent word. Thus, during natural language processing, preceding words would gate or determine
the interpretation of a subsequent word. As an example,
consider the syntactical role of the German article ‘der’. If
in German the preceding expression ‘am ersten Sonntag
nach’ (Engl. ‘on the first Sunday after’) would be presented
as directly preceding the article ‘der’, this determiner ‘der’
would almost certainly be interpreted as a dative case of this
determiner (as in ‘am ersten Sonntag nach der Karwoche’,
Engl. ‘the first Sunday after the Holy Week’). On theoretical
arguments alone, one could therefore expect syntactic and
morphosyntactic processing to be weakly automatic—here,
conditionally automatic. By contrast, it is difficult, if not
impossible, to conceive of syntactic role-disambiguation as
being brought about by the syntactically polyvalent word
itself and without a scaffolding context, because if a word is
syntactically ambiguous in the first place, there is simply no
way for this word to be the sole origin of only its actually
pertaining syntactic role.
To summarize the views: according to the conditionalautomaticity view, awareness-independent automatic
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morphosyntactic and syntactic processing of a word should
depend on two factors, (1) general task sets that make a
particular grammatical function of a word’s form relevant
in the first place, and (2) contextual word-order information
that constrains the participants’ expectancies about the
syntactical role of an upcoming syntactically polyvalent
word. Thus, the conditional automaticity declares that
subliminal syntactic processing is weakly automatic and
predicts strong task-set and word-order dependencies of
subliminal syntactic priming.
An elaborate-processing view would also be in line with
these predicted task-set influences on subliminal syntactic
priming. However, the elaborated-processing view is less
parsimonious than the conditional-automaticity perspective.
Related, the major addition of the elaborate-processing
explanation as compared to the conditional-automaticity
view concerns an assumed potential of the stimulus itself—
here, of the word—to elicit its fitting intention or top-down
task set (cf. Naccache & Dehaene, 2001; van Opstal, Reynvoet, & Verguts, 2005). However, as we have just explained
above, such bottom-up priming of one particular syntactic
role by which a word could impact on its own processing
seems especially unsuited to disambiguate this word’s syntactical status alone. Therefore, in the following we will
mostly refer to the more parsimonious conditional-automaticity view when we motivate our hypotheses although similar predictions could be derived from the more encompassing
elaborate-processing view, too.
Finally, on a strongly automatic view, by contrast,
masked words should be able to elicit their subliminal
syntactic congruence effect in a stimulus-driven way,
regardless of the pertaining task sets and regardless of a
favourable or less favourable word order.
Overview of the current experiments
The aim of the present study was to decide whether a strongly
or a weakly automatic form of processing accounts for subliminal syntactic processing. In light of its theoretical plausibility, we expected that the conditional-automaticity view
of subliminal syntactic priming is correct. To test our
assumption, here, we investigated morphosyntactic processing with subliminal (masked) priming words presented with a
short interval before visible target words. In Experiment 1, we
tested whether German determiners as subliminal primes are
morphosyntactically processed if the determiners singular
gender deflection is task-relevant for our German-speaking
participants. As explained, in the German language, determiners are gender-specific. To test whether the subliminal
determiners’ gender was processed if gender was task-relevant, determiners were either gender-congruent or genderincongruent to the visible target nouns and the participants
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had to discriminate between the masculine and feminine
gender of the visible target nouns. In this situation, on the
basis of weak and strong automaticity, we expected that the
subliminal determiners’ gender-specific deflection is morphosyntactically processed and leads to a congruence effect,
even if the participants are not aware of the determiners.
In Experiment 2, we tested whether the masked determiners’ congruence effect indeed depended on the task relevance of the morphosyntactic gender of the determiners.
This is a prediction derived from the conditional-automaticity
view. We used the same words as primes and targets as in
Experiment 1, but now half of the participants had to discriminate the targets regardless of their gender, and by a
different type of category membership. In this situation, the
gender-specific deflection of the subliminal determiners
should be irrelevant for the target-discrimination performance. Therefore, on the basis of the conditional-automaticity view, the subliminal determiners should be without
effect on target processing. By contrast, on the basis of a
strong-automaticity view of morphosyntactic priming, the
masked words should facilitate processing of a morphosyntactically congruent noun in a stimulus-driven way, so that
the gender-fitting determiner should facilitate the target
classification in comparison to the less fitting determiner,
regardless of task (i.e., in noun-gender classification and
gender-unrelated noun classification).
In Experiment 3, we tested whether a disambiguating
word context (here: a correct word order) indeed increased
the probability of an automatic morphosyntactic congruence effect of the subliminal determiners. This was
assumed under the conditional-automaticity perspective
but not under the elaborated-processing view and not under
a strong-automaticity view. In Experiment 3, we tested this
hypothesis by studying whether the morphosyntactic congruence effect of the subliminal determiners also depended
on a syntactically fitting sequence of words. In German, the
definite nominative determiner that specifies the gender of
a singular noun has to precede this noun. Therefore, if it is
true that a syntactically correct word order (with the
determiner preceding the noun) in Experiments 1 and 2 is
critical for an awareness-independent morphosyntactical
priming effect of the subliminal determiners, the congruence effect of the same words should be absent if the
sequence of words is reversed and nouns are presented
before the determiners. This hypothesis was tested in a
comparison of the congruence effects between Experiment
3 and the gender-relevant congruence effects in Experiments 1 and 2.
Finally, as we used only a restricted set of target nouns
in Experiments 1, 2, and 3, a more representative number
of target nouns was used in the final Experiment 4. In
Experiment 4, we aimed to replicate the subliminal morphosyntactic congruence effect. In Experiment 4, we also
Psychological Research (2013) 77:399–421
included a control condition to test the elaborated-processing view with respect to a semantic dimension of the
words (or a category membership of the words) that was
independent of the words’ gender and their morphosyntactic status.
Experiment 1
We tested masked morphosyntactical priming in two-word
sequences, with a masked and thus subliminal determiner
as a prime word before a visible noun as a target word.
Note that a pair of words consisting of one determiner and
one noun is a very elliptic sentence at best. Therefore, it is
unlikely that the determiner (or the determiner plus noun)
was sufficient to specify the gender-specific interpretation
of the syntactically polyvalent determiners in and by
themselves. This is just one theoretical example, why the
conditional-automaticity view of syntactic and morphosyntactic processing is very likely.
However, because we used a gender-discrimination task
for the visible targets, the gender-specific deflection of the
prime words became task relevant. In every trial of Experiment 1, our German-speaking participants were presented
with a clearly visible German singular noun as a target. The
participants had to discriminate whether the noun was masculine or feminine. This gender discrimination ensured the
task relevance and a particular interpretation of the morphosyntactically gender-specific status of the determiners.
As masked primes, we used the German singular definite
masculine (‘der’) and feminine (‘die’) articles. In congruent
conditions, the prime’s morphosyntactic singular gender fitted that of the subsequent target noun (e.g., both were masculine). For example, the masculine German article ‘der’ was
shown as a masked prime that preceded the visible masculine
target noun ‘Teller’ (Engl. ‘plate’). In incongruent conditions, the prime-word gender did not fit that of the target. For
instance, the masculine article ‘der’ preceded the feminine
target noun ‘Tasse’ (Engl. ‘cup’). If the determiners are
automatically processed and participants had access to the
morphosyntactical status of the subliminal determiners, we
expected a congruence effect: faster responses in congruent
than in incongruent conditions.
This expected congruence effect could be due to different mechanisms. Only, some of these mechanisms
would be forms of weak automaticity. This is true of the
following two mechanisms. First, the gender-specific
morphosyntactical status of the subliminal determiners
could bias the decision in the gender-classification task
(Norris & Kinoshita, 2008). Secondly, the gender-specific
morphosyntactical status of the subliminal determiners
could prime the processing of a gender-related target noun
but less so of an unrelated target gender noun (e.g., as by
spreading activation).
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However, a third explanation of the expected priming
effect is possible and would be based on a strongly automatic stimulus-driven mechanism. Such a strongly automatic process would not be conditional on a fitting task set
and hence not be conditionally automatic: participants’ preexperimental experience with the different frequencies of
co-occurrences of different determiners and subsequent
fitting versus non-fitting gender nouns in written language
could have led to representations of associations between
specific gender-deflected determiners and gender-fitting
nouns in the participants’ mental lexicon. If the different
word concepts are connected in the mental lexicon
according to the relatedness (or an association) between
concepts, encountering a masked determiner could activate
representations of gender-fitting nouns in mental lexicon in
a strongly automatic fashion.
In a first step, the existence of the suspect co-occurrences between specific gender-deflected determiners and
subsequent gender-fitting nouns was confirmed by comparison of the two frequencies of each determiner (‘der’
vs. ‘die’) for its respective preceding of (1) a singular
masculine and (2) a singular feminine noun in a syntactically annotated German text corpus, the tiger treebank:
this corpus contains about 750,000 words of written running text, mostly from the early 1990s Frankfurter
Rundschau issues, a German newspaper (Brants et al.,
2002). Our comparison confirmed that a co-occurrence
existed between the feminine determiner ‘die’ and a
subsequent feminine singular noun (99.97 %). This frequency compared to that of ‘die’ preceding a masculine
singular noun (0.01 %). The analogue reverse relation
holds true of the masculine determiner ‘der’: it frequently
precedes a masculine singular noun (99.92 %) but less
frequently a feminine noun (0.04 %). In a second step, the
possibility that associations based on such empirically
observed collocations accounted for a strongly automatic
stimulus-driven priming effect will be addressed in
Experiment 2.
Selection of target nouns
To increase the likelihood that the expected congruence
effect in the current experiment depended on a prime’s
morphosyntactical gender status, and not on a feature
overlap between prime and target, we carefully selected the
target nouns. German nouns ending with ‘-er’ (e.g.,
‘Teller’, Engl. ‘plate’) are frequently masculine (masculine
77.3 %; feminine 4.82 %; neuter 17.23 %), whereas German nouns ending with ‘-e’ (e.g., ‘Tasse’, Engl. ‘cup’) are
frequently feminine (feminine 52.93 %; masculine
24.97 %; neuter 18.54 %). Crucially, the word endings of
the masculine and feminine determiners ‘der’ and ‘die’,
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thus, are featurally overlapping with the prototypical target
endings of their gender-fitting nouns.
In our task, we also used nouns with such gender-prototypical endings but to prevent that our observers solely
relied on the gender-diagnostic noun endings for their
gender decision and the consequential feature priming by
common word endings of congruent primes and targets, we
used less diagnostic (or ‘not-prototypical’) as well as
diagnostic (or ‘prototypical’) masculine and feminine noun
endings. Thus, not all of our used nouns’ genders could be
discerned on the basis of their endings alone: the feminine
target nouns ‘Gabel’ (Engl. ‘fork’) and ‘Hand’ (Engl.
‘hand’) had the same respective endings as the masculine
target words ‘Löffel’ (Engl. ‘spoon’) and ‘Mund’ (Engl.
‘mouth’). This choice of targets should have prevented the
participants’ reliance on the noun endings and accordingly
that the congruence effect was based on featural overlap
alone.
Also, by using a very restricted sample of only eight
German nouns in total, we were able to present each of the
nouns repeatedly. This has two advantages. (1) It is easier
for the participants to build up a task set for this restricted
sample of repeated target nouns, and we have already
discussed that conditional automatic morphosyntactic processing is supported if the task sets have been completed
(i.e., with words that can well be expected). (2) With many
repetitions for each of the target nouns, the influence of
pre-experimental experience with the target nouns (e.g., the
influence of the noun frequencies or of the determiner-noun
collocations in a corpus of written words) becomes relatively weak in comparison to the experimental experience.
Related, with many repetitions per target noun, we do not
only aim at the control for population-average prior experience with a word (as this could be derived from word
norms) but also at the control for individual differences in
the experience with a word. The latter can be overcome
with much experience within the experiment. For example,
Coane and Balota (2010) showed that repetition of lowfrequency words in an experiment decreased lexical decision times for these words. High-frequency words by
contrast did not profit from repetition within an experiment,
presumably because these words were already discriminated with almost perfect efficiency.
It should be noted, however, that the selection of only a
few target nouns has the severe drawback of testing
masked syntactic priming with only a very limited set of
well-practiced target words. As a consequence, it is not
certain whether the outcome of Experiment 1 would also
generalize to a more natural situation with a larger set of
words that were less practiced in the context of the
experiment (cf. Damian, 2001). Therefore, we also tested
the masked syntactic priming effect with a larger set of less
practiced words in a later experiment (Experiment 4).
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Subliminality of the primes
We also tested whether the masked primes were truly
subliminal. In a second session of Experiment 1, the same
participants had to discriminate between different masked
primes. Otherwise the conditions were similar to the noundiscrimination task. We expected little if any visibility of
the masked primes.
Method
Participants
Fourteen paid volunteers (9 female; mean age 24.1 years)
participated. One had to be excluded because he did not
turn up for the second session. All had normal or correctedto-normal vision by self-report.
Apparatus
Stimuli were presented on a 15-inch colour VGA monitor
(refresh rate = 59.1 Hz). Viewing distance was 57 cm
(ensured by a chin rest). Responses were registered via the
numeric keypad of a serial computer keyboard. To start a
trial, participants pressed the key #5, with the right index
finger. They had to release this home key immediately
before their target response. Target responses were given
by the keys #7 and #9.
Stimuli and procedure
See also Fig. 1. The masked primes were the articles ‘die’
(singular nominative feminine) and ‘der’ (singular nominative masculine). The targets were four feminine nouns,
two from the category china/cutlery, ‘Gabel’ (Engl. ‘fork’),
‘Tasse’ (Engl. ‘cup’), and two from the category body
parts, ‘Nase’ (Engl. ‘nose’) and ‘Hand’ (Engl. ‘hand’), and
four masculine nouns, ‘Löffel’ (Engl. ‘spoon’), ‘Teller’
(Engl. ‘plate’), and ‘Mund’ (‘mouth’) and ‘Arm’ (‘arm’).2
Stimuli were black (\1 cd/m2) on white (48 cd/m2). In
each trial, after the fixation cross (centred on the screen) for
750 ms, a forward mask consisting of 10 random uppercase
letters (each 0.25° long 9 0.39° high) was shown for
200 ms. This was followed by the presentation of the prime
2
The gender-orthogonal category membership of every target word
(as belonging either to the body parts or to the cutlery/china category)
was used for target discrimination in the subsequent Experiment 2.
This was done to create conditions in which gender-specific
deflections of the determiners were task-irrelevant and, due to the
syntactic polyvalence of the determiners, a gender-specific conditionally automatic priming effect should be absent with the same
determiners as primes.
Psychological Research (2013) 77:399–421
405
Mask; 200ms
Masked Prime; 30 ms
Mask; 30 ms
BAEAFGILHT
die
AFCFDZGLZM
Target; until
response
Gabel
Time
Fig. 1 Depicted is an example of a congruent trial. The arrow depicts
the direction of time. Stimuli are not drawn to scale
for 34 ms in lowercase letters, and a backward mask consisting of 10 independently drawn random capital letters
for 34 ms. Finally, the target was shown until the response
or 5 s had elapsed. All stimuli were centred on the screen
and inter-stimulus intervals (ISIs) were 0 ms. Feedback
concerned errors and RTs exceeding 1,250 ms.
We administered a target-gender classification task and
a subsequent prime-visibility task in separate sessions. Up
to 2 weeks passed between the sessions. Each task took
30–45 min. During target classification, participants pressed one key for feminine and another for masculine nouns
and the masked primes were not mentioned.
Before the prime-visibility task, a slow motion was
shown because the participants failed to see the prime.
This was done to expose the primes for a longer duration
and to explain the task to the participants. In the primevisibility task, seven of the participants had to classify
the prime’s gender. In this task, the sequence of events
within trials and the stimuli (including the identities of
primes and targets) were exactly the same as in the
target-classification task. Also, prime-gender discrimination is a valid and straightforward task because it
requires the classification of the dimension of the word
prime which we thought would be responsible for the
priming effect. However, arguably gender discrimination
is not the most sensitive visibility test because the gender status of the clearly visible targets interferes with the
classification of prime gender. Therefore, the remaining
seven participants had to discriminate between prime
words and letter strings. These participants pressed one
key for a string of eight identical letters (e.g.,
‘AAAAAAAA’), and another for the prime word (again
with primes as in the target-classification task). This task
required inclusion of 50 % letter–string trials. Identities
of these letter strings were randomly determined from
trial to trial. Participants were informed about the
probability of the different primes or letter strings and
knew that prime and target identities were uncorrelated
so that prime identity could not be inferred from the
targets. The rationale of the word versus letter string
discrimination was its simplicity and an assumed
dependence of the prime’s gender-specific effect on the
prime’s recognition as a word. The word–letter–string
classification should be simple because it can be based
on the recognition of redundant visual letter information
alone. We also think that this task provided a fair
measure of the prime’s awareness-dependent influence
because the recognition of a word as a word is a logical
prerequisite of the use of the word as a word. Participants were encouraged to guess if they failed to see the
prime. No feedback was given during prime
discrimination.
Both tasks consisted of 3 blocks of 128 trials. This
corresponds to altogether 24 repetitions of the 8 targets 9 2 primes in both of the consecutive tasks, the
gender-classification task of the targets (block 1) and the
prime-gender classification task (i.e., the visibility test in
block 2). If the prime-visibility test required discriminating
between a prime word and a string of letters, each combination was only repeated 12 times per combination
because the other half of the trials contained letter strings.
Trial sequence was random. Stimulus–response mappings
were balanced across participants. Prior to data acquisition,
participants practiced the task for 68 trials.
Results
Target classification
For the results, see Fig. 2. As can be seen, there was a
congruence effect. This impression was confirmed by formal analyses. Out of all responses, 4.6 % were excluded
because individual correct RT exceeded the individual
mean correct RT by more than 2 standard deviations (SDs).
An ANOVA of correct mean RTs, with the variables congruence (congruent vs. incongruent), target gender (masculine vs. feminine), and target category (china/cutlery vs.
body parts), revealed a significant main effect of congruence, F(1, 12) = 12.73, p \ .01, and a tendency towards a
main effect of target gender, F(1, 12) = 4.06, p = .07.
Responses were faster under congruent (RT = 763 ms)
than incongruent conditions (RT = 775 ms), and with
feminine targets (RT = 761 ms) than with masculine targets (RT = 778 ms). We observed no significant main
effect of category, F \ 1.00, and no significant interactions,
all Fs \ 1.30, all ps [ .27.
A corresponding ANOVA of arc-sine transformed error
rates revealed a tendency towards a significant main effect
of congruence, F(1, 12) = 3.87, p = .07, reflecting a lower
error rate (ER) under congruent (ER = 2.2 %) than
incongruent conditions (ER = 2.9 %). Both remaining
main effects, both Fs \ 3.10, both ps [ .10, and interactions, all Fs \ 2.00, all ps [ .19, were nonsignificant.
123
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Psychological Research (2013) 77:399–421
zero visibility (Greenwald et al., 1996). This was found:
a = 12, p \ .01.
10
820
female; china/cutlery
female; body parts
800
8
780
6
760
4
740
2
Errors [%]
RT [ms]
male; china/cutlery
male; body parts
0
720
congruent
incongruent
congruent
incongruent
Fig. 2 Mean reaction times (RTs, in ms) on the left and mean error
rates (in %) on the right as a function of congruence (congruent vs.
incongruent, on the x axis), target gender (feminine circles; masculine
squares), and target category (china/cutlery filled symbols; body parts
empty symbols) in Experiment 1. Vertical lines depict standard errors
Prime visibility
Prime visibility was assessed by d0 (cf. Green & Swets,
1966). d0 is zero for chance performance and can become
infinitely large with an ever increasing accuracy. d0 is a
recommended measure of prime visibility because of its
power to unveil residual visibility and to its relatively
strong independence of judgment tendencies (cf. Reingold
& Merikle, 1988, 1990). Hits were ‘word responses’ to
word primes (or ‘feminine responses’ to feminine primes)
and false alarms (FAs) were ‘word responses’ to letter
strings (or ‘feminine responses’ to masculine primes). To
obtain individual d0 values, we subtracted z-transformed
FA rates from z-transformed hit rates. Mean d0 across the
participants was low in the prime-gender classification
task, d0 = -0.01, t(6) \ 1.00. A larger effect was found in
the word–letter discrimination task, d0 = 0.10, t(5) = 2.07,
p = .09. Averaged across tasks d0 was 0.04, t(12) \ 1.00.
Individual d0 scores varied between -0.52 and 0.20.
Prime visibility and congruence effect
We also calculated a regression, with d0 as a predictor of
the RT congruence effect (incongruent RT minus congruent RT) as a dependent variable. If prime visibility
accounted for the RT congruence effect, we expected a
significant correlation between the visibility measure of the
primes and their RT congruence effect: the better the
prime’s visibility, the larger the congruence effect should
be (cf. Greenwald, Draine, & Abrams, 1996; Naccache &
Dehaene, 2001). The regression analysis showed that there
was no significant correlation between RT congruence
effect and d0 from the visibility test, b = .08, p = .80.
Finally, if the congruence effect is independent of
awareness, we expected a positive intercept of the regression—that is, a significant interpolated congruence effect at
123
Discussion
We found a significant congruence effect. Masked masculine and feminine articles affected the speed with which
the participants classified the gender of visible target
nouns: classification was faster under congruent than
incongruent conditions. This congruence effect stood in
marked contrast to the low visibility of the masked primes.
Of course, it is always difficult to tell whether the visibility
was absolutely nil (cf. Reingold & Merikle, 1988). However, in comparison to studies that do not even measure
visibility (cf. Sereno, 1991), the present study yields a
number of indicators that the participants saw very little of
the primes (if any): the participants’ performance in the
prime visibility test was not significantly better than
chance. Moreover a regression of the congruence effect on
visibility revealed that there was a significant intercept—
that is, an interpolated congruence effect at zero visibility.
Thus, the participants’ awareness of the masked articles
was seemingly not crucial for morphosyntactically processing the articles. Together the results thus supported the
notion that morphosyntactic processing occurs in an
awareness-independent fashion.
Interestingly, our results suggested a difference between
the two visibility tasks. Performance was better in a letter–
word discrimination task than in a prime-gender discrimination task. However, this does not cast too severe doubts
on our interpretation that the congruence effect was independent of the visibility of the prime’s crucial features:
only the prime-gender discrimination task exploited the
same prime information that was also reflected in the
congruence effect. This task indicated zero prime visibility.
By contrast, the word–letter–string discrimination could
have equally drawn on visual low-level features. This was
as intended because we also wanted to use a very sensitive
measure of residual visibility. [By the way, this finding of a
higher sensitivity during the word–letter–string discrimination also underlines the validity of our rationale that
word detection (reflected in a word–letter–string discrimination) is probably a prerequisite of word-gender congruence effects (reflected in the prime-gender classification).]
In target RTs, we also found an unexpected general
advantage for feminine targets. This main effect of gender
on RTs might have reflected that both ‘die’ and ‘der’ more
frequently precede feminine than masculine gender nouns
according to our frequency counts: if we relax the constraint of our collocation counts and do consider plural
masculine and feminine nouns as well as genitives in the
annotated corpus, a frequency tableau shows that both ‘die’
Psychological Research (2013) 77:399–421
and ‘der’ likely precede feminine nouns (73.35 and
59.77 %, respectively) in comparison to masculine nouns
(16.32 and 34.69 %, respectively) and neuter nouns (6.02
and 3.33 %, respectively). The reason for these collocations is that the syntactically polyvalent German words
‘die’ and ‘der’, even if preceding a target noun, can have an
alternative morphosyntactical status. The word for a
masculine singular definite article (‘der’) can be used as
a morphosyntactically appropriate genitive determiner
preceding a feminine singular noun, while the word for a
feminine singular article (‘die’) can also be used as a
syntactically appropriate definite article preceding the
plural nominative form of a masculine noun, too.3 In
terms of the collocation-based associations, the present
prime words were thus generally favourable for expecting and processing of a subsequent feminine target noun
in addition to the determiners’ gender-specific morphosyntactical priming effect for different singular noun
genders.
Experiment 2
In Experiment 2, we now wanted to test whether the subliminal congruence effect reflected a form of weak or of
strong automaticity of morphosyntactic processing. Under
the perspective of the conditional-automaticity view, for
example, the awareness-independent morphosyntactic
congruence effect should crucially depend on the task
relevance of the gender status of the subliminal-priming
words. This criterion was fulfilled in Experiment 1.
Therefore, conditionally automatic processing might have
indeed accounted for the congruence effect. However, in
Experiment 1, forms of strongly automatic priming were
also possible. It could be that the congruence effect
reflected asymmetric syntagmatic prime-target relations
rather than morphosyntactic processing (cf. Kjellmer,
1991). This was suggested by the collocation of primes and
targets in text corpora by our distribution analysis preceding Experiment 1. Thus, a strongly automatic priming
effect based on represented asymmetric syntagmatic relations between primes and targets, respectively, might have
also accounted for the congruence effect. Such an effect
could be of a strongly automatic type without the necessity
407
to refer to any type of top-down malleability, such as
conditional automaticity, at all.
Besides asymmetrical syntagmatic priming, bottom-up
feature overlap between prime and targets with a genderprototypical ending is a second task-invariant property of
prime-target relations that would be a conceivable contributor to Experiment 1’s congruence effect. Both of these
influences would not be affected by the relevance of the
gender discrimination. In contrast to these task-invariant
mechanisms, we assumed that the morphosyntactic gender
congruence effect of the masked primes crucially depends
on the task of classifying the noun genders. Remember that
we used the gender-classification task in Experiment 1
because this task’s relevance was assumed to be critical for
syntactic processing and, thus, crucial for the subliminal
morphosyntactic priming effect. We hypothesized that only
the gender task constrained the interpretation of the syntactically polyvalent prime determiners. The task was
therefore critical for disambiguation of the determiners’
morphosyntactic status because in German, the words ‘die’
and ‘der’, even if preceding the target noun, can take on
alternative morphosyntactical roles. Therefore, if no gender-classification task prompts the determiners’ genderspecific deflections’ task relevance and constrains their
particular morphosyntactical interpretation, these words as
primes should not be uniformly congruent or incongruent
to the subsequent target nouns.
In Experiment 2, we tested the prediction that task relevance created a critical constraint for the morphosyntactic
gender-based congruence effect. In a control condition to
the gender task of Experiment 2, our participants discriminated between target nouns by categories that were
orthogonal to target gender. These participants decided
whether the target noun was from the china/cutlery category
(e.g., ‘plate’) or from the body parts category (e.g., ‘nose’).
In that task, we used exactly the same words as primes and
targets as during gender classification. We expected no
congruence effect if the congruence effect reflected conditionally automatic morphosyntactic assessment of the prime
word gender status. By contrast, with bottom-up letter
priming or asymmetric syntagmatic association priming, we
expected the same congruence effect in the control condition as in the experimental condition of Experiment 2, a
gender-classification task, and as in Experiment 1.
3
In the present study, this was only true for the two masculine china/
cutlery target nouns that had the same singular as plural word form
(‘Teller’, and ‘Löffel’). For the two masculine body-part target nouns
with different singular (‘Arm’ and ‘Mund’) than plural word forms
(‘Arme’ and ‘Münder’, respectively) the German word ‘die’ was not a
syntactically fitting plural article. The masculine body-part target
conditions allowed us therefore to assess task-independent syntactic
prime-target congruence effects in Experiment 2’s gender-independent category task. No such congruence effect was found. Therefore,
the task relevance was crucial for the primes’ syntactic use.
Method
Participants
Twenty-eight paid volunteers (14 female, mean age
23.7 years) participated. All had normal or corrected-tonormal vision by self-report.
123
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Psychological Research (2013) 77:399–421
Apparatus, stimuli, and procedure
10
780
760
6
720
4
700
2
680
Target classification
In Fig. 3, one can see that the gender-discrimination task
again led to a significant congruence effect. As can be seen
from Fig. 4, however, the congruence effect was absent in
the control conditions in which the morphosyntactic status
of the primes was task-irrelevant. This impression was
corroborated by ANOVAs.
Out of all responses, 4.2 % were excluded because
correct RT exceeded the mean by more than 2 SDs. An
ANOVA of correct mean RTs, with the within-participant
variables congruence (congruent vs. incongruent), target
gender (masculine vs. feminine), and target category
(china/cutlery vs. body parts), and the between-participants
variable task (gender classification vs. control task)
revealed a significant main effect of congruence, F(1,
23) = 15.34, p \ .01. Responses were faster under congruent (RT = 718 ms) than incongruent conditions
(RT = 726 ms). A significant congruence 9 task interaction, F(1, 26) = 11.44, p \ .01, meant that the congruence
effect was restricted to the gender-classification task
10
780
female; china/cutlery
female; body parts
760
8
740
6
720
4
700
2
680
Errors [%]
RT [ms]
male; china/cutlery
male; body parts
0
congruent
incongruent
congruent
incongruent
Fig. 3 Mean reaction times (RTs, in ms) on the left and mean error
rates (in %) on the right as a function of congruence (congruent vs.
incongruent, on the x axis), target gender (feminine circles; masculine
squares), and target category (china/cutlery filled symbols; body parts
empty symbols) in the target gender-classification task of Experiment
2. Vertical lines depict standard errors
123
Errors [%]
740
0
congruent
Results
8
male; china/cutlery
male, body parts
RT [ms]
Half of the participants classified targets as belonging to
the china/cutlery category or to the body parts category.
This was the control condition. Half of the participants
classified target gender. This was the experimental condition. Otherwise, the procedure was identical to the targetclassification task of Experiment 1. (The prime-visibility
measure was skipped because essentially the same conditions as in Experiment 1 were used.)
female; china/cutlery
female; body parts
incongruent
congruent
incongruent
Fig. 4 Mean reaction times (RTs, in ms) on the left and mean error
rates (in %) on the right as a function of congruence (congruent vs.
incongruent, on the x axis), target gender (feminine circles; masculine
squares), and target category (china/cutlery filled symbols; body parts
empty symbols) in the control condition of Experiment 2. Vertical
lines depict standard errors
[congruent RT = 723 ms; incongruent RT = 739 ms,
t(13) = 5.38, p \ .01, see Fig. 3]. No congruence effect
was found in the control task (congruent RT = 723 ms;
incongruent RT = 714 ms, see Fig. 4). A significant gender 9 task interaction, F(1, 26) = 10.51, p \ .01, reflected
that in the gender-classification task responses were (nonsignificantly) slower for masculine targets (RT = 735 ms)
than feminine targets (RT = 727 ms), t(13) = 1.24,
p = .24, whereas in the control task, this pattern reversed
[masculine targets: RT = 703 ms; feminine targets:
RT = 722 ms, t(13) = 3.61, p \ .01].
In addition, we found tendencies towards significant
gender 9 congruence, F(1, 26) = 3.14, p = .09, and gender 9 congruence 9 task interactions, F(1, 26) = 3.27,
p = .08. As can be seen by comparing Figs. 3 and 4, a
stronger congruence effect for masculine than feminine
targets was restricted to the gender-classification task. (In
the control task, the congruence effect was equally small
under all target conditions.) The other main effects, all
Fs \ 1.80, all ps [ .19, and interactions, all Fs \ 2.80, all
ps [ .10, were nonsignificant.
A corresponding ANOVA of arc-sine transformed error
rates revealed a significant main effect of gender, F(1,
26) = 5.62, p \ .01. It reflected a lower error rate (ER) for
masculine
(ER = 1.0 %)
than
feminine
targets
(ER = 1.8 %). In addition, there was a significant congruence 9 target category interaction, F(1, 26) = 5.62,
p \ .01, with a significant congruence effect in the china/
cutlery category (congruent ER = 1.0 %; incongruent
ER = 2.0 %), t(27) = 2.49, p \ .05, but not in the bodyparts category (congruent ER = 1.3 %; incongruent
ER = 1.3 %) category, t \ 1.00. Main effects, all
Fs \ 2.30, all ps [ .14, and the remaining interactions, all
Fs \ 1.50, all ps [ .23, were nonsignificant.
Psychological Research (2013) 77:399–421
Discussion
In line with the notion that weak automaticity in general
and conditional automaticity in particular were responsible
for the morphosyntactic priming effect, the RT results
showed a task dependence of the congruence effect. Only,
the gender-classification task prompted the relevance of the
gender status of the masked determiners and constrained
interpretation of the (morphosyntactical) role of the
masked articles in such a way that a significant congruence
effect resulted. In the gender-classification task, the morphosyntactic status of the prime could have either facilitated processing of a congruent target gender but less so of
an incongruent target gender, or the prime’s morphosyntactic status could have directly biased the decision (cf.
Norris & Kinoshita, 2008). The results are also in line with
an elaborated-processing view of subliminal priming.
According to this view, participants would have applied
their task sets to the subliminal primes, too. From an
elaborated-processing view, however, it is not so clear why
the classification of target categories should have prevented
the congruence effect. Thus, it seems that the greater
flexibility of the elaborated-processing view allowing to
explain task set influences on masked priming comes at the
expense of less clear predictions.
Unexpectedly, the gender-congruence effect in the
experimental group was slightly stronger with masculine
nouns than with feminine nouns. It is possible that this was
a mere chance finding because no such interaction was
found in Experiment 1. However, it is also possible that
subtle differences between ‘die’ and ‘der’ accounted for
this difference. For example, if more closure of the end
letter ‘e’ of the feminine article allowed a quicker activation of the representation of the feminine article in
the mental lexicon than less closure of the final letter ‘r’ of
the masculine article, this might explain that on average the
activation of the masculine prime word was slower than
that of the feminine article. This in turn could have
diminished interference of the incongruent masculine
primes with the feminine nouns (compare to Fig. 3),
thereby, mitigating the net congruence effect with the
feminine targets.
In any case, in the control conditions, target gender
was irrelevant for the task and this changed task failed to
support an interpretation of the masked primes as singular gender-specific articles. As a consequence, we
observed little evidence for a gender-based article-noun
RT congruence effect. Moreover, the RT advantage for
the feminine target nouns that we found in Experiment 1
was also no longer observed in the control conditions.
We do not know how the reverse RT advantage for
masculine targets (as compared to feminine targets) in
the control condition of Experiment 2 came about.
409
Maybe the greater visual resemblance of all feminine
targets that all shared the vowel ‘a’ at the second letter
position (‘Tasse’; ‘Gabel’; ‘Hand’; ‘Nase’) made it taxing to classify these targets as belonging to different
categories. In comparison, not all of the masculine articles did share a letter at one position (‘Teller’; ‘Mund’;
‘Arm’, ‘Nase’) and this overall visual distinctiveness
might have facilitated their classification into different
categories. Whatever the exact origin of the male targets’
RT advantage in the control condition, importantly,
without a task constraining prime interpretation to a
particular morphosyntactical role (here: a gender-specific
inflexion), the masked prime seemingly frequently failed
to figure as a genitive determiner or a plural article, too
(but see below).
However, with the error rates the picture in the control
condition was different. Here, the congruence effects were
fairly similar across tasks. The error rates in the china/
cutlery category reflected a residual prime/article-target/
noun gender congruence effect in the control condition.
This is interesting. Masculine target nouns in this category
(‘Teller’, and ‘Löffel’) have the same singular and plural
word forms. In this condition, the ‘incongruent prime
word’ ‘die’ would therefore have syntactically fitted if
interpreted as a definite plural article. Maybe the six
remaining noun targets prevented interpretation of the
masculine china/cutlery targets as plurals. The six
remaining noun targets were singular (and have a different
singular than plural word form). Therefore, the majority of
singular target nouns might have suggested interpretation
of all target nouns as singular.
It is of course also possible that this residual genderbased article-noun congruence effect reflected strongly
automatic priming. Whatever the reason for the residual
congruence effect: as predicted, the RT congruence effect
was significantly diminished in the control condition.
Therefore, priming on the basis of one of two strongly
automatic principles—that is, strongly automatic priming
via bottom-up stimulus-driven feature overlap of target
noun endings by congruent prime article endings or priming via asymmetric syntagmatic relations, is not the major
origin of the congruence effect.
Experiment 3
According to a weak-automaticity view in general and the
conditional-automaticity perspective in particular, we have
argued for the supportive if not necessary role of the wordorder context for subliminal morphosyntactic processing. In
Experiment 3, we tested this hypothesis. Again, task relevance was ensured by a gender-discrimination task. However, in contrast to Experiments 1 and 2, we changed the
word order which would be necessary for automatic
123
410
morphosyntactic processing of the primes as gender-specific deflections for a subsequent singular-case noun. This
means that if the congruence effect in Experiments 1 and 2
was truly of a morphosyntactic origin, a fitting word order
disambiguating the determiner’s grammatical role should
be also crucial for a morphosyntactical congruence effect.
In general, word order and word form (or morphosyntactical
deflection) interact during syntactical processing to figure
both as expectancy refinements (Friederici & Weissenborn,
2007). In the case of a gender-specifying singular determiner, the correct German word order requires that the
determiner precedes the noun to specify the noun’s gender.
Therefore, if in the gender-discrimination tasks of Experiments 1 and 2, the conditionally automatic morphosyntactical processing of the prime accounted for the congruence
effect, the congruence effect should be diminished if the
word order of article and noun is reversed. In Experiment 3,
using nouns as primes that precede determiners as targets,
the subsequent determiner no longer specifies the preceding
singular noun’s gender.
One particular source of the word-congruence effect that
has the potential to survive the reversal of word order in the
current experiment is automatic retrieval of determiners as
closed words from mental lexicon: it is possible that a
particular determiner with a fitting gender is automatically
retrieved as part of the representation of a noun in the
mental lexicon (cf. Garrett, 1988). Therefore, it is possible
that the priming noun’s gender in the present experiment
activated the congruent target determiners but not the
incongruent determiners by way of a joint representation of
nouns with their gender-specific fitting determiners in the
mental lexicon. As a consequence, the joint representation
of nouns and determiners in the mental lexicon could lead
to a congruence effect in the present experiment. To more
exhaustively test this prediction of a strongly automatic
origin of the congruence effects of the determiners, we also
included indefinite articles as targets in the present experiment. In German, the indefinite masculine (‘ein’) and
feminine (‘eine’) articles are not used as plural determiners. These determiners have therefore an even higher
probability of being stored together with the nouns in a
gender-specific way in mental lexicon.
Also according to a strongly automatic spreading-activation explanation, we might also expect a prime-target
gender-congruence effect under the conditions of the
present experiment. If the gender-congruence effect in the
preceding experiments reflected an activation of shared
genders of prime and target but regardless of whether or
not the sequence of words was syntactically appropriate,
we should also find a prime-target congruence effect with
the reversed order of nouns as primes and determiners as
targets.
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Psychological Research (2013) 77:399–421
In Experiment 3, the nouns that we used as primes
differed between blocks. In one block, we used the words
‘Nase’ and ‘Arm’ as primes. In a second block, we used the
words ‘Hand’ and ‘Mund’ as primes. In a third block, the
prime nouns were ‘Tasse’ and ‘Teller’, and in a fourth
block, the primes were the nouns ‘Gabel’ and ‘Löffel’. In
this way, we aimed to keep the number of different primes
per each of the blocks low and akin to the number of
different article primes in the preceding Experiments 1 and
2. Also, the inclusion of the variable prime type (block) in
our analysis should shed light on the role of the word
endings for the congruence effect in the present experiment. For example, if the gender-prototypicality of the
noun-prime endings promoted their gender-based congruence effect, we should find a significant effect when
‘Tasse’ and ‘Teller’ are used as primes, but not when
‘Hand’ and ‘Mund’ are used as primes.
Method
Participants
Seventeen paid volunteers (11 female, mean age
26.1 years) participated. All had normal or corrected-tonormal vision by self-report.
Apparatus, stimuli, and procedure
German masculine and feminine definite articles (used as
primes in the preceding experiments) and indefinite articles
(feminine: ‘eine’, masculine: ‘ein’) were used as visible
targets. The nouns that we used in the preceding experiments were the masked primes. Each noun prime was
orthogonally combined with each target, leading to 32
combinations (8 nouns 9 4 articles). Each combination
was repeated 16 times.
In each of four blocks of the target-gender classification
task, only two nouns were used as primes. Blockwise
separated, one feminine and one masculine noun was used,
either (1) ‘Tasse’ and ‘Teller’, (2) ‘Gabel’ and ‘Löffel’, (3)
‘Hand’ and ‘Mund’, or (4) ‘Nase’ and ‘Arm’. The different
block orders were balanced across participants. By using
only two nouns per block, the primes varied less. This
made the procedures in Experiments 1, 2, and 3 more
similar to one another.
After the target-classification task, a prime-gender
classification was used as a prime-visibility test. This was
done to ascertain that the visibility of the masked nouns
was also low. (Note that this cannot be derived from the
visibility of the articles in the preceding experiments.)
Otherwise, procedures were as in Experiment 1.
Psychological Research (2013) 77:399–421
411
Results
Target classification
For the results see Table 1. Out of all responses, 4.5 %
were excluded because correct RTs deviated by more than
2 SDs from the mean. We ran an ANOVA of the correct
mean RTs with the within-participant variables target type
(definite article; indefinite article), congruence (congruent;
incongruent), target gender (masculine; feminine), and
prime type/block (‘Hand’–‘Mund’; ‘Tasse’–‘Teller’;
‘Nase’–‘Arm’; ‘Gabel’–‘Löffel’).
Of major interest in the present context, this ANOVA
revealed a significant main effect of congruence, F(1,
16) = 4.69, p \ .05, and a significant three-way interaction
of congruence 9 gender 9 prime type/block, F(3, 48) =
3.63, p \ .05. The main effect of congruence reflected the
typical finding of faster RTs in congruent (RT = 673 ms)
than in incongruent conditions (RT = 678 ms). More
interestingly, the three-way interaction showed that this
congruence effect reflected significant congruence effects in
only three out of eight prime-type cases. Two out of the
significant three prime-type conditions were masked noun
primes with a gender-prototypical ending, the masculine
noun ‘Teller’ (congruence effect = 17 ms, t[17] = 2.89,
p \ .05) and the feminine noun ‘Nase’ (congruence
effect = 10 ms, t[17] = 2.12, p \ .05). In addition, the
masculine noun ‘Arm’ that was presented in the same blocks
as ‘Nase’ led to a significant congruence effect (13 ms,
t[17] = 2.63, p \ .05), too. Also noteworthy, the congruence effect failed in the blocks in which the noun primes
had a similar ending (i.e., in blocks in which the noun
primes ‘Hand’ and ‘Mund’ were used, and in blocks in
which the noun primes ‘Gabel’ and ‘Löffel’ were used), as
well as with the noun prime ‘Tasse’ (which was used in the
same blocks as the noun prime ‘Teller’), all non-significant
congruence effects, ts \ 1.20, all ps [ .17. To summarize
these findings, if the noun endings discriminated between
genders, this was a favourable (if not necessary) condition
for the congruence effect. By contrast, the beneficial impact
of the gender-prototypicality of the noun prime’s ending on
the congruence effect was less certain.
In addition, in this ANOVA we found a main effect of
target type, F(1, 16) = 11.17, p \ .01, and a target
type 9 gender interaction, F(1, 16) = 43.86, p \ .01. RTs
were faster with definite (RT = 665 ms) than with indefinite (RT = 686 ms) articles as targets. This, however, was
qualified by the interaction which showed that the masculine targets accounted for the advantage of the definite
determiners (RT = 655 ms) as compared to the indefinite
determiners (RT = 700 ms), t(16) = 5.76, p \ .01,
whereas with the feminine targets there was no strong
difference between indefinite (RT = 775 ms) and definite
determiners (RT = 772 ms), t \ 1.00. All other effects and
interactions were not significant, all Fs \ 1.80, all
ps [ .20.
Table 1 Mean reaction times (RTs) in milliseconds and error rates (ERs) in percent (in parentheses) for the different conditions of Experiment 3
Prime
Target
Congruence
Mean RT
(ER)
Standard
errors
Net
congruence
effects
Mund
der
Congruent
650 (0.7)
16 (0.5)
15 (2.4)
Hand
der
Incongruent
665 (3.1)
17 (1.6)
Hand
die
Congruent
688 (4.8)
15 (1.5)
Mund
die
Incongruent
681 (6.1)
16 (1.6)
Arm
der
Congruent
650 (1.9)
19 (1.2)
Nase
der
Incongruent
652 (2.3)
17 (0.9)
Nase
die
Congruent
665 (1.2)
17 (0.7)
Arm
Löffel
die
der
Incongruent
Congruent
670 (1.6)
664 (2.6)
20 (0.7)
16 (1.1)
Gabel
der
Incongruent
657 (1.6)
16 (1.0)
Gabel
die
Congruent
678 (2.2)
16 (0.8)
Löffel
die
Incongruent
682 (2.4)
17 (0.8)
Teller
der
Congruent
654 (1.5)
12 (0.9)
Tasse
der
Incongruent
651 (0.8)
16 (0.5)
Tasse
die
Congruent
663 (3.5)
14 (1.4)
Teller
die
Incongruent
673 (3.7)
14 (1.4)
-7 (1.3)
2 (0.4)
Prime
Target
Congruence
Mean RT
(ER)
Standard
errors
Mund
ein
Congruent
699 (7.4)
15 (2.4)
Hand
ein
Incongruent
699 (3.8)
16 (1.3)
Hand
eine
Congruent
683 (3.6)
17 (1.2)
Mund
eine
Incongruent
680 (1.9)
16 (1.2)
Arm
ein
Congruent
682 (5.0)
17 (1.5)
Nase
ein
Incongruent
700 (5.8)
18 (1.5)
Net
congruence
effects
1 (-3.6)
-3 (-1.7)
18 (0.8)
5 (0.4)
Nase
eine
Congruent
657 (2.7)
19 (1.3)
21 (-0.8)
-7 (-1.0)
Arm
Löffel
eine
ein
Incongruent
Congruent
678 (1.9)
705 (3.6)
19 (0.7)
15 (2.0)
3 (2.9)
Gabel
ein
Incongruent
708 (6.5)
16 (2.9)
Gabel
eine
Congruent
671 (3.1)
15 (1.1)
Löffel
eine
Incongruent
674 (1.1)
17 (0.9)
Teller
ein
Congruent
710 (7.2)
17 (1.8)
Tasse
ein
Incongruent
696 (8.6)
13 (2.0)
Tasse
eine
Congruent
653 (4.1)
15 (1.4)
Teller
eine
Incongruent
678 (3.8)
16 (1.1)
4 (0.2)
-3 (-0.7)
10 (0.2)
3 (-2.0)
-14 (1.4)
15 (-0.3)
Mean RTs and ERs are compared in the congruent and incongruent conditions and the net congruence effect is calculated as the mean
performance in the incongruent condition minus the mean performance in the congruent condition. Standard errors from the mean values are also
provided (for error rates in parentheses)
123
412
A corresponding ANOVA of the arc-sine transformed ERs
led to a significant main effect of target type, F(1, 16) = 4.72,
p \ .05, and again to a significant target type 9 gender
interaction, F(1, 16) = 20.82, p \ .01. As was the case with
the RTs, the main effect of target type reflected better performance with definite articles (ER = 2.5 %) than with
indefinite articles (ER = 4.4 %) as targets, and the interaction revealed that this advantage owes to the masculine targets for which latter the definite articles (ER = 1.8 %)
outperformed the indefinite articles (ER = 6.0 %),
t(16) = 3.61, p \ .01. By contrast, the differences between
feminine definite (ER = 3.2 %) and indefinite articles
(ER = 2.8 %) were again negligible, t \ 1.00.
There was also a significant prime type/block 9 target
type interaction, F(3, 48) = 3.99, p \ .05 (e = 0.86).
Interestingly, this effect reflected that the advantages of
definite as compared to indefinite articles as targets were
found within the same blocks in which significant congruence effects were found. The target-type effect (indefinite articles’ ER minus definite articles’ ER) was found in
the blocks with ‘Nase’ and ‘Arm’ noun primes [2.0 %;
t(16) = 3.01, p \ .01] and in blocks with ‘Tasse’ and
‘Teller’ noun primes [3.1 %; t(16) = 2.96, p \ .01]. By
contrast the effect of target type was absent in the
remaining blocks, both nonsignificant ts \ 1.00.
In addition, we observed an almost significant main effect
of prime type/block, F(3, 48) = 2.87, p = .07 (e = 0.70),
and an almost significant three-way interaction of target
type 9 prime type/block 9 gender, F(3, 48) = 2.69,
p = .06. The effect of prime type/block reflected somewhat
elevated ERs in blocks with ‘Hand’ and ‘Mund’ primes
(ER = 3.9 %) or with ‘Tasse’ and ‘Teller’ primes
(ER = 4.1 %) as compared to blocks with ‘Nase’ and ‘Arm’
primes (2.8 %) or with ‘Gabel’ and ‘Löffel’ primes (2.9 %).
The three-way interaction was again suggestive of a role of
word endings. A striking example is the different influence of
the ‘Hand’ and ‘Mund’ primes on masculine definite
(ER = 1.9 %) and indefinite (ER = 5.6 %) articles versus
on feminine definite (ER = 5.5 %) and indefinite
(ER = 2.8 %) articles that showed a definite-article advantage with masculine targets and an indefinite-article advantage with feminine targets. (Other differences existed but
were not as strong as the example above. The performance in
the other conditions can be inferred from Table 2.) The
results were not quite significant and unpredicted but again
point to the word endings as one powerful factor for how well
the targets could be processed.
Psychological Research (2013) 77:399–421
from Experiment 2’s control condition with an alternative
classification task were not considered.) We restricted
Experiment 3’s data to the definite article conditions
because only these were used as primes in Experiments 1
and 2 and can, thus, be strictly compared. This ANOVA
included the additional between-participants variable
sequential prime-target order [article primes noun (Experiments 1 and 2); noun primes article (Experiment 3)]. It
revealed a significant main effect of congruence, F(1,
42) = 16.26, p \ .01, and, most importantly, a significant
congruence 9 prime-target order interaction, F(1,
42) = 8.33, p \ .01. Responses were faster in congruent
(RT = 703 ms) than incongruent conditions (RT =
711 ms), but the interaction reflected that this was only true
for definite articles that primed nouns (congruent
RT = 742 ms; incongruent RT = 756 ms), t(26) = 6.32,
p \ .01, but not for the reversed order in which nouns
primed definite articles (congruent RT = 664 ms; incongruent RT = 666 ms), t(16) \ 1.00. (The absence of the
congruence effect means that the residual overall congruence effect in Experiment 3 stems mostly from the trials
with indefinite articles as targets.)
In addition, the ANOVA confirmed a significant main
effect of experiments, F(1, 28) = 14.03, p \ .01, with
faster responses in Experiment 3 (RT = 655 ms) than
Experiments 1 and 2 (RT = 750 ms), and a significant
target gender 9 prime-target order interaction. Responses
to feminine targets (RT = 743 ms) were faster than to
masculine targets (RT = 755 ms), t(26) = 2.36, p \ .05,
in Experiments 1 and 2 but they were faster to masculine
(RT = 655 ms) than to feminine targets (RT = 675 ms),
t(16) = 3.03, p \ .01, in Experiment 3.
Prime visibility
Masking was reasonable as indicated by a small and nonsignificant d0 = 0.05, t(16) = 1.87, p = .08. Individual d0
values varied between -0.10 and 0.19.
Prime visibility and congruence effect
As in Experiment 1, we ran a regression analysis to test
whether a significant correlation between the RT congruence
effect and d0 from the visibility test obtained. This was not the
case, b = .00, p = .99. However, in line with an awarenessindependent congruence effect, we found a positive intercept
of the regression, a = 4.51, p \ .05 (one-sided).
Congruence effects as a function of sequential
prime-target order
Discussion
A further ANOVA concerned the correct RTs of Experiments 1, 2 and 3’s target-gender classification data. (Data
With respect to our question whether the masked primes
led to a strongly automatic or to a conditionally automatic
123
Psychological Research (2013) 77:399–421
congruence effect, the results of Experiment 3 were mixed.
On the one hand, we found a stronger congruence effect of
the definite articles in Experiment 1 where the sequential
order fostered the morphosyntactic priming effect than in
the current experiment where the sequential order was
reversed. This finding would be in line with the assumed
conditional dependence of a morphosyntactic priming
effect on a fitting syntactical context.
However, on the other hand, several caveats needed to
be considered. First of all, it is possible that it took more
time to process the gender of the longer noun prime words
in the present experiment than the shorter article prime
words in Experiment 1. As a consequence, the participants
might have derived a noun prime’s gender simply too late
to allow an effect on the processing of the target articles in
the present experiment.
In addition, with the extremely simple task of classifying just four target words, the current experiment might
have also discouraged an in-depth processing of the target
words’ meanings and this in turn could have mitigated all
effects depending on an in-depth processing of the word
meanings, such as a priming effect of the noun-prime
gender. For instance, the participants might have neglected
the target-gender information completely and could have
just looked at an article’s discriminative letters for their
target classifications. In line with this possibility, there was
a main effect of target gender and an interaction of target
gender and target type that could be interpreted along these
lines. With the masculine article targets, participants were
better at definite (‘der’) than indefinite (‘ein’) determiners.
This could have reflected a low overlap of only one shared
letter between different genders for (1) ‘der’ and ‘die’, and
(2) ‘der’ and ‘eine’. This should have facilitated the recognition and gender-classification of ‘der’. This advantage
was found to be especially strong in comparison to the
indefinite masculine article ‘ein’, possibly because ‘ein’
shared all letters with the alternative gender target ‘eine’,
and because ‘ein’ shared two of its letters with the alternative gender target ‘die’. In summary, it is plausible that a
non-semantic decision, for instance, a mere letter-based
discrimination of the articles’ genders, sufficed to successfully classify the targets and this could have undermined a semantic effect of the primes.
Finally, it is possible that the changed context of prime
words per block in the present experiment counteracted a
congruence effect. In Experiment 1, all primes had a gender-prototypical ending and prime genders could be discriminated by the prime-word endings in all of the trials.
By contrast, in Experiment 3, only half of the primes had a
gender-prototypical word ending and the primes’ gender
could only be discriminated by the prime endings in half of
the blocks. For instance, it is impossible to discriminate
between (the gender of) the masculine prime ‘Mund’ and
413
the feminine prime ‘Hand’ by looking at their endings
(e.g., ‘-nd’). Also, in line with a supportive role of the
prime-word endings for the congruence effect, the RT
congruence effect was only found when the different
gender primes had different endings. For example, the
congruence effect was found in a block where the masculine prime ‘Arm’ and the feminine prime ‘Nase’ were used.
Therefore, Experiments 1 and 3 did not only differ by their
respective order of articles and targets but also by factors,
such as the degree to which word meaning was helpful to
solve the task and the context of prime words (i.e., whether
or not the prime gender could be discriminated by the
prime-word endings).
Of course, on the basis of a strongly automatic spreading-activation account, we would have expected that prime
and target meaning would be processed and should become
effective in the form of a congruence effect in Experiment
3 anyway. However, the residual congruence effect in the
present experiment is also compatible with a stimulusdriven explanation of the congruence effect that puts an
emphasis on the prime-word endings rather than on the
prime meaning to account for the congruence effect (e.g.,
priming of the target ‘der’ by the shared letters of the prime
‘Teller’; but see Experiments 2 and 4 for counter
evidence).
Experiment 4
Experiments 1, 2, and 3 used a very restricted target set.
This is a limitation because, in general, prior research has
shown that a restricted target set and many repetitions of
targets are beneficial for relatively simple masked-priming
effects that have little to do with deeper-going processing
of the primes (cf. Damian, 2001; Kouider & Dupoux,
2004). Damian (2001), for example, found out that only the
words that belonged to the set of target words created a
subliminal congruence effect and that word repetitions in
his experiment were very helpful for the subliminal congruence effect. Of course, the explanation of Damian
(2001) that the primes acquired a particular response
meaning via practice with their visible target-counterparts
cannot explain our findings in Experiments 1 and 2 because
as primes we used ‘novel’ words that were not contained in
the target set. The use of novel words as primes is generally
regarded as a favourable condition for the fool-safe demonstration of the more sophisticated forms of subliminal
priming, such as an elaborate semantic processing of the
masked prime (cf. Naccache & Dehaene, 2001). Yet, our
suspicions regarding the participants’ use of the (low-level)
target-word letters for classifying the targets in Experiment
3 illustrated the limitations of using only a restricted target
set. If the participants used the target letters (e.g., in particular the target-word endings) for the target classification,
123
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Psychological Research (2013) 77:399–421
Table 2 German nouns used in Experiment 4, their English translations (in italics), and the word frequency counts (retrieved from
http://dict.uni-leipzig.de/; on January 15, 2012)
Feminine/animals
Feminine/unanimate
Masculine/animals
Masculine/unanimate
Maus (mouse)
2180
Glut (glowing fire)
291
Hund (dog)
11
Herd (hearth)
893
Laus (louse)
119
Uhr (clock)
369
Fuchs (fox)
2683
Kamm (comb)
520
Gans (goose)
322
Schnur (string)
558
Frosch (frog)
526
Knopf (button)
795
Muschel (mussel)
188
Gabel (fork)
394
Igel (hedgehog)
567
Wimpel (pennant)
158
Wachtel (quail)
131
Nudel (noodle)
63
Esel (donkey)
814
Pinsel (brush)
748
Amsel (blackbird)
164
Nadel (needle)
826
Gimpel (bullfinch)
28
Kegel (skittle)
233
Kobra (cobra)
Natter (adder)
119
38
Tuba (tuba)
Zither (zither)
266
11
Panda (panda)
Tiger (tiger)
196
1877
Talar (gown)
Kleister (paste)
118
79
Viper (viper)
57
Klapper (rattle)
15
Hamster (hamster)
223
Kleber (glue)
234
Flunder (flounder)
67
Leier (lyra)
197
Kaefer (beetle)
1063
Wecker (alarm clock)
947
Elster (mapgpie)
131
Butter (butter)
1326
Marder (marten)
154
Besen (broom)
577
Fliege (fly)
920
Saege (saw)
299
Habicht (goshawk)
71
Zirkel (dividers)
741
Katze (cat)
1623
Spritze (syringe)
603
Maulwurf (mole)
238
Wuerfel (dice)
690
58
Biene (bee)
190
Kanne (jug)
182
Iltis (polecat)
43
Duebel (dowel)
Muecke (moscito)
234
Muenze (coin)
816
Kiebitz (pewit)
79
Hobel (plane)
65
Meise (titmouse)
78
Brause (shower)
109
Schakal (jackal)
38
Fueller (fountain-pen)
125
Ziege (goat)
1179
Geige (violin)
1025
Fasan (pheasant)
65
Spaten (spade)
387
Ente (duck)
697
Taste (key)
813
Falter (butterfly)
229
Rechen (rake)
7
Eule (owl)
273
Wolle (wool)
902
Bussard (buzzard)
46
Sextant (sextant)
18
Qualle (jelly-fish)
44
Kelle (scoop)
163
Bulle (bull)
365
Becher (cup)
663
Spinne (spider)
240
Robe (robe)
245
Loewe (lion)
1019
Opal (opal)
48
Wespe (wasp)
Taube (pigeon)
87
579
Lampe (lamp)
Salbe (ointment)
861
107
Rabe (raven)
Affe (monkey)
362
359
Kessel (kettle)
Loeffel (spoon)
811
515
Motte (moth)
257
Matte (mat)
568
Hase (hare)
839
Haken (hook)
1561
Kroete (toad)
266
Floete (flute)
715
Ochse (ox)
106
Ofen (stove)
1108
No. letters/word
Frequency
No. letters/word
Frequency
No. letters/word
Frequency
No. letters/word
Frequency
Ø = 5.32
Ø = 407.32
Ø = 5.20
Ø = 468.96
Ø = 5.48
Ø = 478.24
Ø = 5.68
Ø = 483.9
The average frequencies below the columns were computed relative to the 400,000 entries in the online data bank (cited above) and retrieved on
that day
this could at least account for the residual congruence
effect of the prime words (i.e., in particular the prime-word
endings) that we found in Experiment 3 and in the error
rates of the control condition of Experiment 2.
However, if subliminal morphosyntactic priming was
truly at work, it should be possible to demonstrate the
principle of masked morphosyntactic priming with a
broader set of target words, too. This test was conducted in
the present experiment in which a set of 100 different target
nouns was used, 50 of them masculine and 50 feminine. As
in Experiment 1, the singular feminine and masculine
definite determiners were used as masked primes. These
determiners as primes were orthogonally combined with
the nouns as targets to create equal amounts of syntactically gender-congruent and syntactically gender-incongruent conditions. If the morphosyntactic status of the primes
is responsible for the congruence effect we should find a
congruence effect with the larger set of nouns of
123
Experiment 4: we expected a gender-congruence effect,
with faster responses in syntactically gender-congruent
than in syntactically gender-incongruent conditions
because the participants again had to classify the target
noun’s gender, so that a gender-congruent determiner
should facilitate this classification (as compared to a gender-incongruent prime) even if the congruence effect critically hinges on the participants’ intentions.
Also, in Experiment 4, we included masked nouns as
primes in half of the trials. This was done to compare the
morphosyntactic gender-priming effect with a genderindependent category-priming effect. The noun primes
were either of a congruent or of an incongruent category in
comparison to the category of the noun targets. Here, in
category-congruent conditions, both prime noun and target
noun denoted animals (e.g., ‘quail–blackbird’) or both
denoted unanimated items (e.g., ‘saw–fork’). Likewise, in
category-incongruent conditions, the prime noun denoted
Psychological Research (2013) 77:399–421
an animal and the target noun an unanimated item (e.g.,
‘cat–violin’) or the prime noun denoted an unanimated
item and the target noun an animal (e.g., ‘coin–spider’).
Prior research has demonstrated that a masked categorycongruence effect based on such a category membership
can at least be found if the category difference between
animals and unanimated items is task relevant (e.g., Finkbeiner & Palermo, 2009).
In the present experiment, we did not necessarily expect
such a straightforward category-congruence effect, with
faster responses in category-congruent than categoryincongruent conditions. The reason is that the conditionalautomaticity view implies that task relevance is critical for
the processing of unconscious stimuli. Thus, it could also
be that the participants ignored the task-irrelevant genderindependent category membership of the noun primes in
the present experiment because the category membership
of the nouns was irrelevant for the task at hand and even
misleading with respect to the task because half of all
masculine targets denoted animals (and half inanimate
items) and half of all feminine targets denoted animals (and
half inanimate items).
However, according to a spreading-activation explanation of masked priming, the subliminal nouns could well
have triggered an in-depth semantic processing of their
meaning even if this would not be required. The same
would be true according to an elaborated-processing view
(cf. Dehaene et al., 1998; Naccache & Dehaene, 2001).
Thus, if the morphosyntactic gender-congruence effect of
the masked articles reflected a kind of category-priming
effect which was based on spreading activation or on an
elaborate processing of all masked word prime meaning
and regardless of the task relevance, we expected a category-congruence effect of the masked nouns, too.
Method
Participants
Twenty-one volunteers (18 female; mean age 23 years)
participated in exchange for course credit. Two participants
had to be excluded because they conducted more than
20 % errors on average. One bilingual (native Hungarian)
participant had to be excluded because after the experiment
she reported difficulties with the task. All had normal or
corrected-to-normal vision by self-report.
Apparatus, stimuli, and procedure were the same as in
Experiment 1, with the following exceptions. A larger
number of target nouns was used, 50 per genus, feminine
and masculine, half of which were from the category of
animal names and half were from the broad category of
unanimated items. All nouns were high-frequency words
415
(with more than 60 counted instances in 1 million words,
cf. Jescheniak & Levelt, 1994). In the present experiment,
frequency estimates were based on word counts in the
Wortschatz Lexikon of the University of Leipzig,
http://dict.uni-leipzig.de/, and frequencies were computed
relative to 400.000 entries, contained in the Wortschatz
Lexikon on the date of retrieval (January 15, 2012). All
nouns denoted relatively concrete objects (e.g., kitchen
utensils, musical instruments, tools, animals), and the lists
of the two gender-independent noun categories (animals vs.
unanimated items) as well as the lists of the two different
gender-type nouns (of feminine vs. masculine nouns) were
approximately equated for the average noun lengths and
noun frequencies (see Table 2). For each list of the different gender targets, the nouns were carefully selected in
such a way that the noun endings of the same gender varied
[e.g., the German feminine nouns ‘Taube’ (Engl. ‘pigeon’)
vs. ‘Natter’ (Engl. ‘adder’)], and that the noun beginnings
of the same gender varied [e.g., the German masculine
nouns ‘Kessel’ (Engl. ‘kettle’) vs. ‘Besen’ (Engl.
‘broom’)]. Likewise, nouns were selected so that the endings of nouns of different genders were sometimes the
same [e.g., the German feminine noun ‘Amsel’ (Engl.
‘blackbird’) and the masculine ‘Wimpel’ (Engl ‘pennant’)],
and the same was true of the noun beginnings (e.g., the
German feminine noun ‘Wespe’ (Engl. ‘wasp’) and the
masculine ‘Wecker’ (Engl. ‘alarm clock’)]. As a consequence, neither the noun beginnings nor the noun endings
were diagnostic of the task-relevant gender categories.
Again, the use of different noun endings also allowed us to
include both, nouns with a gender-prototypical ending
[e.g., the feminine noun Ente (Engl. ‘duck’) ending on the
prototypical feminine ending ‘-e’] as well as less prototypical endings [e.g. the feminine noun Elster (Engl.
‘magpie’) ending on the prototypical masculine ending
‘-er’]. This time we also included a formal analysis of the
syntactic gender-congruence effect based on only the
nouns with a non-prototypical ending. This was done to
assess whether the syntactical gender-congruence effect of
the masked determiners can also be replicated when the tobe-classified target nouns have a non-prototypical ending
with respect to their gender.
Different from the preceding experiments, in half of all
trials we also used nouns as primes and targets. In these
conditions, we measured a ‘category-congruence effect.’ In
the following, we reserve the labels of ‘category congruence’
and ‘category incongruence’ to denote different degrees of
gender-independent category membership of prime and
target (i.e., a higher degree of category membership in the
congruent and a lower degree in the incongruent conditions,
respectively). In the category-congruent conditions, both—
prime and target—were animal names or both denoted unanimated items. In the category-incongruent conditions, the
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prime was an animal name and the target denoted an unanimated item (or vice versa). Note that the performance
during both category-congruent and category-incongruent
noun–noun pairings was assessed independently of the noun
gender because all of these pairings were gender-congruent.
For instance, in the category-incongruent condition, an
animal name, such as the German noun ‘Fuchs’ (Engl.
‘fox’) might have preceded the label of an inanimate item,
such as the German noun ‘Duebel’ (Engl. ‘dowel’) but even
in these cases both would have been exemplars of the same
gender (in the example both would have been masculine). In
this way, we aimed for an assessment of the categorycongruence effect that was independent of the gendercongruence. (We restricted the noun–noun pairings to the
gender-congruent cases to prevent combinatorial explosion
of the conditions, and to overcome the resulting difficulties
in the balancing of morphosyntactical priming conditions
on the one hand and of category-priming conditions on the
other hand.)
In a total of 400 trials, each noun was used 4 times as a
target and two times as a prime (only in the categorypriming conditions). Each article was equally often used as
a prime (in exactly 100 trials). Half of all trials were used
to assess the subliminal morphosyntactic congruence
effect. In the morphosyntactic priming conditions, the noun
targets were orthogonally combined with each of two
article primes, leading to 25 % syntactically congruent and
to 25 % syntactically incongruent conditions out of all
trials. The other half of the trials was used to assess the
category-congruence effect. In the category-priming conditions, each noun was equally often preceded by (a randomly chosen) noun from the same category and by a
(randomly chosen) noun from a different category, leading
to another 25 % category-congruent trials and to 25 %
category-incongruent trials.
Within each of five blocks of 80 trials, the different
conditions were presented in a random order, with the
following constraints: syntactic (or article) primes and
category (or noun) primes were equally likely and every
individual noun was at best used once as a target and was
additionally at best used once as a prime. Again, repetition
priming (i.e., identical prime and target nouns within a
trial) was prevented.
Different from the preceding experiments, prime visibility was estimated during the target-classification trials.
After each target classification, the participants had to
judge whether a noun had been presented as a masked
prime before the target. This prime-visibility test was
selected because on the basis of the conditional-automaticity view, we expected a difference between the
processing of the noun primes and the article primes:
gender-congruence effects with the prime articles but not
necessarily category-congruence effects with the noun
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Psychological Research (2013) 77:399–421
primes. This instruction also allowed us not to mention
the article primes. (If a participant wanted to know what
other objects or words than nouns would be presented, we
told her or him that it was her or his task to find out.) In
this manner, again, it was ensured that the article primes
did not belong to a ‘set of expected words’ (if that is what
counts for whether or not a priming effect is trivial) and,
thus, could be considered as ‘novel’. Also, the method of
collecting target-classification responses and prime-visibility judgments in the same trials has the additional
advantage of measuring the prime visibility under the very
conditions in which prime visibility matters for the congruence effect: during target classification (cf. Ansorge,
Fuchs, Khalid, & Kunde, 2011; Finkbeiner & Palermo,
2009).
The experiment consisted of 400 trials in total. Prior to
the first block, participants practiced the task for at least 20
trials. Together with short breaks between the blocks, the
experiment took between 60 and 75 min.
Results
Target classification
Out of all responses, 6.7 % were excluded because correct RTs deviated by more than 2 SDs from the mean.
An ANOVA of correct mean RTs, with the within-participant variables congruence (congruent vs. incongruent), target gender (feminine vs. masculine) and prime
type (noun vs. article) revealed a significant congruence 9 prime type interaction, F(1, 17) = 38.97,
p \ .01. Follow-up t tests split up for prime types and
target gender confirmed the existence of a significant
syntactic congruence effect of the masked masculine
articles, t(17) = 3.02, p \ .01, with faster RTs in gendercongruent (RT = 825 ms) than in gender-incongruent
conditions (RT = 848 ms). The effect of the masked
feminine articles was smaller [gender-congruent
RT = 817 ms; gender-incongruent RT = 833 ms; t(17) =
2.17, p \ .05]. By contrast, a significant reverse categorycongruence effect was found with the feminine noun
primes, t(17) = 5.29, p \ .01, with slower responses in
category-congruent (RT = 840 ms) than category-incongruent conditions (RT = 804 ms), and a similar tendency
was found with the masculine noun primes [category-congruent RT = 844 ms; category-incongruent RT = 830 ms;
t(17) = 1.55, p = .14].
The main effects of congruence, prime type, both
Fs \ 1.00, and of target gender, F(1, 19) = 1.12, p = .30,
were not significant. The same was true of the remaining
two-way interactions, Fs \ 2.50, both ps [ .14, and the
three-way interaction, F(1, 17) = 1.80, p = .20.
Psychological Research (2013) 77:399–421
In a complementary analysis, we assessed whether the
syntactic congruence effect could also be observed when
the target nouns all had a non-prototypical ending. To that
end, we excluded all trials with target nouns of a genderprototypical ending that could be primed by their congruent
article’s ending (all feminine nouns ending on ‘-e’, and all
masculine nouns ending on ‘-er’), and again compared the
congruent and incongruent RTs. In the corresponding
t tests, a significant congruence effect with the masculine
targets was successfully replicated, t(17) = 2.73, p \ .05,
with faster responses in morphosyntactically congruent
conditions (RT = 840 ms) than in incongruent conditions
(RT = 866 ms). However, no significant syntactic congruence effect was found with the feminine targets [gender-congruent
RT = 825 ms;
gender-incongruent
RT = 841 ms; t(17) = 1.55, p = .14].
A corresponding ANOVA of the arc-sine transformed
error rates revealed only a tendency towards a significant
main effect of congruence, F(1, 17) = 4.32, p = .053. ERs
were slightly higher in the congruent (4.8 %) than in the
incongruent condition (3.5 %). [As was the case in the
RTs, this tendency towards a reverse congruence effect
owes mostly to the category-priming conditions, in which
the congruence effect (incongruent ER–congruent ER)
amounted to -1.6 %, t(17) = 2.75, p \ .05. This compares to the (reverse) morphosyntactic congruence effect of
-0.9 %, t(17) = 1.06, p = .30. However, like the main
effects of target gender, F(1, 17) = 3.00, p = .10, and of
prime type, F(1, 17) = 1.18, p = .29, on ERs, the gender 9 prime type interaction, F(1, 17) = 2.36, p = .14,
the congruence 9 prime type interaction, the congruence 9 gender interaction, and the three-way interaction,
F \ 1.00, failed to become significant in the ER analysis.
Prime visibility
Masking was relatively effective as indicated by a small
and non-significant d0 = 0.05, t(17) = 1.73, p = .10.
Individual d0 values varied between -0.08 and 0.38.
Prime visibility and congruence effect
Again, if prime visibility accounted for the RT congruence
effect, we expected a significant correlation between the
visibility measure of the primes and their RT congruence
effect. However, there was neither a significant correlation
between d0 and the gender-congruence effect of the masculine article primes, b = -.28, p = .26, nor of the feminine article primes, b = -.36, p = .15, nor between
visibility and the reversed category-congruence effect of
the feminine noun primes, b = -.17, p = .50. The intercept of the regression with the masculine article primes was
significant, a = 25, p \ .01, whereas it was not significant
417
with the feminine article primes, a = 12, p = .13, and with
the feminine noun primes there was also a significant
negative intercept, a = -31, p \ .01.
Discussion
Experiment 4 replicated the morphosyntactic priming
effect with a larger number of different target nouns but
only with male targets. With male targets, if a masked
determiner was gender-congruent to the visible target,
target-gender classification was facilitated. Facilitation was
found in comparison to a gender-incongruent condition, in
which the masked determiner was of a different gender
than the visible target. This congruence effect with the
male targets could also be replicated by looking at the
target nouns with non-prototypical gender endings alone
and although the masked prime articles were not seen by
our participants.
By contrast, there was no significant morphosyntactic
congruence effect with the female targets when we
restricted our analysis to the non-prototypically ending
nouns. Likewise, we were not able to establish a truly
subliminal morphosyntactic congruence effect with the
feminine determiners by an intercept criterion of the
regression predicting the RT congruence effect from visibility. Also, because all target words, feminine and masculine nouns, were carefully equated for major
determinants of processing speed such as length and frequency, we believe that the absence of the congruence
effect is most likely due to the specifics of the priming
principles of ‘die’ versus ‘der’. Maybe the feminine targets’ congruence effect was mediated by the perceptual
priming of the word endings. With the feminine targets, if
the prime’s ending letters and the target’s ending letters
matched (as in the example with a prime ‘die’ before the
target ‘Kroete’; Engl. ‘toad’) this could have facilitated
RTs in comparison to the case where they did not match
(e.g., with the prime ‘der’ before the target ‘Kroete’).
In addition to the morphosyntactic congruence effect, a
control condition with noun primes shed interesting light
on the facets and limits of subliminal processing. With the
feminine noun targets, we found a reverse category-congruence effect based on whether or not the noun prime
and the noun target belonged to the same category (of
animals or inanimate items) or to different categories.
This finding is in line with the elaborate-processing
hypothesis of masked priming. According to the elaborate
processing explanation, unconscious stimuli are semantically analysed (Dehaene et al., 1998). This semantic
analysis could also be carried out with respect to semantic
features that are not defined as task-relevant (cf. Van
Opstal et al., 2005).
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Note, however, that even if the elaborate-processing
view holds true for the gender-unrelated meaning it would
still be an open question whether or not the morphosyntactic congruence effect was also due to elaborated processing. Related, conditional automaticity might also
account for the reverse category-priming effect. In the
present experiment, the same priming words that led to a
reverse category-congruence effect were also clearly seen
because these words were also used as targets where their
gender had to be judged. In this situation, a conditionalautomaticity view could be defended by assuming that
participants have found it helpful to suppress the nouns’
gender-independent task-irrelevant category membership
because this feat was equally distributed across the relevant
gender conditions and thus provided a distracting dimension. So it existed, the participants might have also inadvertently applied this active top-down set to suppress the
target words’ task-irrelevant category membership to the
masked prime nouns.
General discussion
Several lines of past evidence indicated that syntactic and
morphosyntactic processing is automatic (e.g., Gunter
et al., 2000; Pulvermüller, Shtyrov, Hasting, & Carlyon,
2008). For example, of particular importance in the context
of the present study, prior findings showed awarenessindependent syntactic processing in patients suffering from
amnesia (Ferreira et al., 2008) and during subliminalpriming studies with healthy participants (cf. Sereno,
1991).
However, which kind of automatic processing, a weak
or a strong form of automaticity was reflected in subliminal
morphosyntactic priming was not so clear. On the basis of
the necessity to disambiguate the syntactic function of
syntactically polyvalent words during human language
comprehension by preceding contextual information, we
have argued for a conditional-automaticity view of subliminal morphosyntactic processing (cf. Ansorge & Neumann, 2005; Bargh, 1992; Kunde et al., 2003). According
to this view, once task sets or preceding word-order contexts have sufficiently disambiguated the potential syntactic role of an upcoming word, morphosyntactic processing
of this word could run off in a quick and awareness-independent fashion. This kind of conditional automaticity
would be a weak form of automatic processing because it
would not be purely stimulus-driven.
However, we have also explained that stimulus-driven
forms of intention-independent processing, that is, strong
automaticity, could account for subliminal morphosyntactic priming. For example, a word might elicit an activation
that spreads to other words in the mental lexicon in a
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Psychological Research (2013) 77:399–421
stimulus-driven way. This spreading of activation might
lead to a subliminal-priming effect based on the tighter
connections between particular syntagmatically related
words or based on a closer connection between words that
are in line with a subliminal-priming word’s syntactical
roles. In both these cases, particular instances of subliminal
priming of syntactically fitting target words by preceding
subliminal prime words could be explained without the
necessity to refer to intentions and task sets.
To decide between these explanations, we derived several predictions. On the basis of the conditional-automaticity hypothesis of morphosyntactic processing, we
expected that morphosyntactic priming with subliminal
words can be found but that these awareness-independent
priming effects are dependent on the task relevance of the
syntactic status of the priming words and on the supportive
context in which the priming words are presented. To test
our hypotheses, we used German determiners as masked
primes. These determiners have an ambiguous morphosyntactical status, and we used tasks and sequential word
orders (of determiner and noun) to disambiguate the morphosyntactical status of the primes in varying degrees. Due
to efficient masking, the prime words were barely seen. In
this sense, the priming effects that we observed were
independent of the participants’ awareness. In Experiments
1 and 2, both the task of classifying the gender of a clearly
visible target word as well as the sequential word order
(with the determiner as a prime preceding the noun as a
target), fostered a morphosyntactical role of the subliminal
determiners as masculine or feminine definite articles of
the nouns. In line with our expectations, we observed a
significant congruence effect. Articles with a gender that
fitted to the visible nouns facilitated gender classification of
the nouns. This was in comparison to trials in which articles had an opposite gender as compared with the targets.
Next, we verified that the task relevance of the gender
status of the primes was indeed crucial for the congruence
effect. To start with, in German, the determiners that we
used are morphosyntactically polyvalent or ambiguous.
The feminine determiner ‘die’, for example, can be used as
a definite singular article for only feminine nouns but it is
used as a grammatically valid plural article for feminine
and masculine nouns. Likewise, in German, the masculine
article ‘der’ of singular masculine nouns can also be
interpreted as a genitive determiner for a feminine singular
noun. Therefore, we think that syntactic processing is
inherently conditional on task sets or on constraining
contextual information and that the gender classification
was a necessary precondition for the gender-specific
interpretation of the articles and the resultant congruence
effect.
This prediction of the conditional-automaticity view of
morphosyntactic priming was tested and confirmed in
Psychological Research (2013) 77:399–421
Experiment 2’s control task. If in a control task the participants had to classify the same noun targets as belonging
to different semantic categories (china/cutlery versus body
parts) orthogonal to the target’s gender status, noun gender
can be disregarded. In this condition, the task no longer
suggested that the same masked prime determiners were
interpreted as singular definite articles of a particular
gender. Accordingly, the gender-based congruence effect
was absent in the control task of Experiment 2. This is clear
support for weak automaticity. By contrast, on the basis of
a merely stimulus-driven view of subliminal morphosyntactic priming, we would have expected equal congruence
effects in both tasks. For example, if the functional role of
the prime representation would have automatically primed
all fitting gender targets in a stimulus-driven way, this
effect should have occurred in both tasks. This prediction
of a strong-automaticity view was clearly falsified in
Experiment 2.
In Experiment 3, we confirmed that the masked congruence effect of the definite determiners was also sensitive
to the sequential order of the words. For its gender-based
morphosyntactical congruence effect, a German definite
article has to precede a noun. Therefore, if the congruence
effect of the definite articles indeed reflected conditionally
automatic morphosyntactical processing of the article, we
expected the diminution of the congruence effect if the
word order of nouns and articles was reversed. This
hypothesis was tested in Experiment 3 in which nouns were
used as masked primes preceding visible determiners as
targets. The results supported the conditional-automaticity
view of morphosyntactic priming because the congruence
effect in Experiment 3’s reversed word-order conditions
with definite articles was significantly weaker than in
Experiment 1 and 2’s ‘correct-syntactic order’ conditions.
This was found although a gender-discrimination task was
used in all of the conditions of Experiment 3.
In Experiment 3, we also found a significant residual
gender-based congruence effect that evidently did not
depend on the syntactically correct word order of determiners before nouns. This congruence effect could have
reflected a joint representation of the articles and the nouns
in mental lexicon (cf. Garrett, 1988). However, on closer
inspection, this congruence effect was found to be also
fostered by particular masked noun primes—that is, noun
primes of a different gender that had different word endings. Some but not all of these noun primes had also
gender-prototypical endings. Thus, stimulus factors such as
gender-discriminating letters at the end of the subliminal
primes or even an overlap between subliminal prime and
target letter endings might have contributed to the subliminal congruence effect. This was corroborated in the
final Experiment 4. In Experiment 4, we found clear evidence for an article-noun congruence effect when a larger
419
number of targets had to be classified. However, in this
experiment, we also observed that the overlap of the article
and noun endings supported the congruence effect at least
with the feminine targets.
Experiment 4 also yielded some evidence for an intention-independent elaborated processing of the subliminal
word primes. With noun–noun prime-target pairings, a
significant negative congruence effect in a task-unrelated
dimension (an animate–unanimate category-membership
distinction of the words) was found. This reverse congruence effect meant that even aspects of the subliminal
prime-word meanings which were task-irrelevant were
processed. The elaborated-processing view would account
for this result. The elaborated-processing view would also
be in line with the observed top-down dependence of the
subliminal articles’ congruence effects in Experiments 2
and 3. In this respect, the elaborated-processing view is as
powerful a principle as the conditional-automaticity view.
However, it is not certain whether the elaborated-processing view truly accounts for the subliminal morphosyntactic priming effect. In particular, the explanation of an
elaborated processing of the subliminal gender status and its
active suppression appears less parsimonious than the conditional-automaticity view according to which the masked
articles’ gender-specific syntactical role would have simply
only be processed with a fitting task set and would have not
been processed without such a fitting task set.
In conclusion, with respect to human subliminal morphosyntactic processing, our results nicely confirmed some
predictions derived from a conditional-automaticity view
in particular and a weak-automaticity view in general.
They also confirmed previous claims by Sereno (1991) who
first concluded the existence of a masked syntactic congruence effect, albeit with a few caveats that we wanted to
overcome (such as uncertain degrees of unawareness of her
participants).
Acknowledgments This work was supported by GRC Grants AN
393/2-1 and AN 393/5-1 (Germany).
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