Testing theories of language processing: an empirical investigation of the on-line lexical decision task.

On-line lexical decision has been used to test major theoretical hypotheses about language comprehension. Contrary to several current models, A. Sharkey and N. Sharkey (1992) found that a word in a sentence did not give facilitation to an immediately following, highly associated test item. In this article it is shown that such facilitation can be obtained. Other theories have proposed that syntactic processes supply antecedents for implicit anaphors. In using a test item that was an associate of the antecedent of the anaphor, the authors were unable to replicate previous findings of facilitation at but not before the site of the anaphor. Across 9 experiments, obtaining facilitation depended on the choice of control condition. This dependency raises questions about previous on-line lexical decision results that have been used to support the immediacy of syntactic processing.