The effect of semantic constraint of a noun phrase on determining the prepositional representation of a sentence

A meaning of a verb depends on the noun phrase it is combined with. A verb ""open"" used in a sentence as ""I open a window"" was interchangeable with the antonym ""close,"" but that used in ""I open a can"" was noninterchangeable. Thus, although the representation of the sentence ""I open a window"" might be associated with the ""close,"" the representation of the sentence ""I open a can"" might not. In the experiment, the priming technique was used in order to examine whether the propositional representation of the interchangeable sentence was different from that of the noninterchangenable sentence. The prime stimuli were the Japanese sentences which consist of a noun phrase and a verb, and the target stimuli were the antonyms. Sixteen participants were required to make lexical decisions to the target stimuli. The result showed that the interchangeable sentence facilitated the classification of the antonym, but the noninterchangeable sentence did not. This result suggests that the constraint of the noun phrase determine the individual propositional representation for each sense