Subliminal understanding of active versus passive sentences

Three experiments were run in an attempt to demonstrate the unconscious processing of active-versus-passive sentences. Using subjective measures to assess individual thresholds of subliminal perception, participants were presented with a prime sentence that denoted whether 1 of 2 characters was active or passive within the sentence (e.g., “A is injecting B,” “A is injected by B”). When subsequently required to choose between 2 pictorial representations (i.e., character A as active, character B as active), participants were able, overall, to identify the correct images for both active and passive conditions beyond chance expectations (when averaged over all experiments). As expected, participants also took longer to respond to passive than active sentences. In sum, the present research demonstrates that people are able to process the meaning of word combinations that they are not consciously aware of seeing.