Semantic priming at the sentence level: causal vs. purposive because

Abstract

In the present study we use the property of some linguistic items to express more than one meaning in order to investigate whether there is semantic priming at the sentence level. To test such a priming effect we use the connective because that can express a causal or purposive relation. If there is a priming effect, then participants will be expected to use causal because following causal primes and purposive because following purposive primes more frequently. The preliminary results do not reveal a clear priming effect but a slight trend toward priming, which we will continue to investigate increasing the number of participants.