A study investigated the hypothesis that, for adult native speakers of English, increasing syntactic complexity would lead to increased salience of phonological properties of words. The study also examined whether syntactic simplicity would lead to a greater salience of semantic properties of words. Subjects were required to name a word presented on a monitor after a context sentence. Syntactic complexity of the context sentence was varied. The target word was phonologically or semantically related or unrelated to the last word in the sentence. The time interval between the end of the context sentence and the word to be named was also varied. Resulting data provided no support for the hypothesis. However, trends in the data suggested that there is some interplay between lexical accessing and syntactic processing. There was a tendency for frequency of the target word to correlate with naming time in complex syntax conditions (less frequent words were named more slowly), and there was also some indication that salience of activated words was maintained under conditions of syntactic complexity as time for sentence processing (the context sentence--naming word interval) was increased. (FL)