Phonological Typicality Influences Sentence Processing in Predictive Contexts: Reply to Staub, Grant, Clifton, and Rayner (2009) Thomas A. Farmer University of Rochester Padraic Monaghan Lancaster University Jennifer B. Misyak and Morten H. Christiansen Cornell University In 2 separate self-paced reading experiments, Farmer, Christiansen, and Monaghan (2006) found that the degree to which a word’s phonology is typical of other words in its lexical category influences online processing of nouns and verbs in predictive contexts. Staub, Grant, Clifton, and Rayner (2009) failed to find an effect of phonological typicality when they combined stimuli from the separate experiments into a single experiment. We replicated Staub et al.’s experiment and found that the combination of stimulus sets affects the predictiveness of the syntactic context; this reduces the phonological typicality effect as the experiment proceeds, although the phonological typicality effect was still evident early in the experiment. Although an ambiguous context may diminish sensitivity to the probabilistic relationship between the sound of a word and its lexical category, phonological typicality does influence online sentence processing during normal reading when the syntactic context is predictive of the lexical category of upcoming words. Keywords: language processing, lexical categories, learning, sentence comprehension Language comprehension is a complex task that involves con- structing an incremental interpretation of a rapid sequence of incoming words before they fade from immediate memory, and yet the task is typically carried out efficiently and with little conscious effort. To achieve this level of speed and efficiency, the adult comprehension system exploits multiple sources of information that might facilitate the task. Many factors, including referential context (e.g., Altmann, Garnham, & Dennis, 1992; Spivey, Tanen- haus, Eberhard, & Sedivy, 2002), lexically based verb biases (e.g., Trueswell, Tanenhaus, & Kello, 1993), plausibility (e.g., Garnsey, Pearlmutter, Myers, & Lotocky, 1997), and prosody (e.g., Snede- ker & Yuan, 2008), appear to constrain how an incoming string of words is processed (for reviews, see Altmann, 1998; Elman, Hare, & McRae, 2004). Such informative cues are used not only to resolve previously encountered ambiguous input but also to gen- erate syntactic expectations for what may come next. Indeed, a growing number of studies suggest that prediction-based process- ing is a necessary component of efficient and effortless interpre- tation of language as it unfolds in time (e.g., Altmann, 1998; Rayner, Ashby, Pollatsek, & Reichle, 2004; Staub & Clifton, 2006; for reviews, see Hagoort, 2009; Pickering & Garrod, 2007). Convergent results have been found in event-related potential experiments (for a review, see Federmeier, 2007), showing that highly specific expectations are generated for both lexical category and phonological properties of upcoming words given a predictive context. Thus, during online sentence processing, context-based expectations are rapidly generated for (a) the grammatical gender of upcoming words, such as specific gender markings of nouns following a gender-marked adjective in spoken Dutch (Van Ber- kum, Brown, Zwitserlood, Kooijman, & Hagoort, 2005) or in written Spanish (Wicha, Moreno, & Kutas, 2004); (b) the lexical category of the next word (e.g., a noun following a determiner; Hinojosa, Moreno, Casado, Mun ˜oz, & Pozo, 2005); and (c) the onset phoneme of the next word (e.g., words starting with a consonant after a or a vowel after an in English; DeLong, Urbach, & Kutas, 2005). Building on this work, Farmer, Christiansen, and Monaghan (2006) investigated whether phonological typicality—the degree to which the sound properties of an individual word are typical of other words in its lexical category—influences online language processing in predictive contexts, testing a hypothesis originally put forward by Kelly (1992) and supported by recent work on language acquisition (e.g., Cassidy & Kelly, 2001; Fitneva, Chris- tiansen, & Monaghan, 2009; Monaghan, Christiansen, & Chater, 2007). Farmer et al. presented results from a corpus analysis, showing that nouns tend to sound like other nouns and verbs like other verbs; that is, nouns and verbs form separate coherent, yet Thomas A. Farmer, Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Uni- versity of Rochester; Padraic Monaghan, Department of Psychology, Lan- caster University, Lancaster, England; Jennifer B. Misyak and Morten H. Christiansen, Department of Psychology, Cornell University. This work was supported by a Dolores Zohrab Liebmann fellowship awarded to Thomas A. Farmer. We thank Mateo Obregon at the University of Edinburgh and Marc Brysbaert at the Universiteit Gent for assistance with the analyses presented here. Thanks are also due to Alex Fine at the University of Rochester for helpful discussions about learning effects in sentence processing experiments and Suzanne Dikker for her insights into the effects reported here. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Morten H. Christiansen, Department of Psychology, Cornell University, 228 Uris Hall, Ithaca, NY 14853. E-mail: christiansen@cornell.edu Journal of Experimental Psychology: © 2011 American Psychological Association Learning, Memory, and Cognition 2011, Vol. 37, No. 5, 1318 –1325 0278-7393/11/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/a0023063 1318