Immediate effects of form-class constraints on spoken word recognition

In many domains of cognitive processing there is strong support for bottom-up priority and delayed top-down (contextual) integration. We ask whether this applies to supra-lexical context that could potentially constrain lexical access. Previous findings of early context integration in word recognition have typically used constraints that can be linked to pair-wise conceptual relations between words. Using an artificial lexicon, we found immediate integration of syntactic expectations based on pragmatic constraints linked to syntactic categories rather than words: phonologically similar “nouns” and “adjectives” did not compete when a combination of syntactic and visual information strongly predicted form class. These results suggest that predictive context is integrated continuously, and that previous findings supporting delayed context integration stem from weak contexts rather than delayed integration.