Semantic priming from letter-searched primes occurs for low- but not high-frequency targets: Automatic semantic access may not be a myth.

[Correction Notice: An erratum for this article was reported in Vol 34(1) of Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition (see record 2007-19381-019). In the article "Semantic Priming From Letter-Searched Primes Occurs for Low- but Not High- Frequency Targets: Automatic Semantic Access May Not Be a Myth," by Chi-Shing Tse and James H. Neely (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 2007, Vol. 33, No. 6, pp. 1143-1161), the URL for the supplemental materials was incomplete. The complete URL is http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0278-7393.33.6.1143.supp] Letter-search (LS) within a prime often eliminates semantic priming. In 2 lexical decision experiments, the authors found that priming from LS primes occurred for low-frequency (LF) but not high-frequency (HF) targets whether the target's word frequency was manipulated between or within participants and whether the prime-target pairs were associated symmetrically or forward asymmetrically. For the LF targets, LS priming was (a) equivalent for forward asymmetric and symmetric pairs and (b) equal to silent-read (SR) priming for forward asymmetric pairs but less than SR priming for symmetric pairs. The typical finding of greater SR priming for response times for LF than for HF targets occurred for symmetric priming but not for forward asymmetric priming, which showed the interaction for errors. The authors consider their findings' implications for various accounts of how LS affects priming and explain the findings within J. H. Neely and D. E. Keefe's (1989) 3-process model as follows: (a) LS eliminates expectancy and semantic matching but does not reduce semantic activation and (b) expectancy contributes to SR priming for HF targets but not for LF targets, whereas the opposite is so for semantic matching. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Automatic semantic priming: Effect of category exemplar level and word association level.

Evaluated semantic priming when the prime was masked below naming threshold and the target was named in 4 experiments with 263 undergraduates. Exp I showed that when word primes were masked and word targets were named, prior knowledge of the related pairs did not alter semantic priming. Semantic priming within categories occurred only when the prime stimulus was the 1st category exemplar. Findings of Exp II indicate that when masked pictures were used as primes, semantic priming for word targets was sensitive to the category exemplar level of the prime but not to the category exemplar level of the target. Word association norms collected in Exp III did not support the hypothesis that the effect of category exemplar level was mediated by the strength of word association. Exp IV revealed significant semantic priming for masked picture primes and within-category word targets, regardless of the level of word association between prime and target. Exp IV also demonstrated semantic priming for high word association targets that were not members of the same semantic category. For all experiments, Ss with the longest average reaction times (RTs) also showed the largest semantic priming effect for naming word targets. It is suggested that viewing one of the highest ranking category exemplars activates the memory representation of the category, perhaps because such prototypic exemplars are contained within the category concept itself. (22 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Semantic Priming of Different Affective Categories.

The authors investigated affective semantic priming using a lexical decision task with 4 affective categories of related word pairs: neutral, happy, fearful, and sad. Results demonstrated a striking and reliable effect of affective category on semantic priming. Neutral and happy prime-targets yielded significant semantic priming. Fearful pairs showed no or modest priming facilitation, and sad primes slowed reactions to sad targets. A further experiment established that affective primes do not have generalized facilitatory-inhibitory effects. The results are interpreted as showing that the associative mechanisms that support semantic priming for neutral words are also shared by happy valence words but not for negative valence words. This may reflect increased vigilance necessary in adverse contexts or suggest that the associative mechanisms that bind negative valence words are distinct. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

New limits to automaticity: Context modulates semantic priming.

It is widely assumed that semantic priming in visual word recognition is automatic when the task requires word-level analysis. The present experiments show that this conclusion is too strong. Whether brief-duration primes facilitated the processing of related targets in lexical decision depended on the context in which the primes were seen. Semantic priming occurred if Ss saw only brief primes (blocked condition) but was minimal if longer primes were presented as well (mixed condition). Converging operations indicate that this modulation of semantic priming reflects operations beyond the lexical level rather than early encoding deficits. Rather than being automatic, semantic priming depends on the context in which a word is read. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Expectancy effects in social stereotyping: Automatic and controlled processing in the Neely paradigm.

This research attempted to extend the classic cognition study, Neely (1977), to the domain of social stereotypes. Neely demonstrated the existence of automatic and controlled processing in the same paradigm and the differing effects these processes have on accessing category information. The current research extended these findings by using social groups and stereotypes as stimuli, rather than nonsocial categories. Participants were told to expect characteristics of the Black stereotype following the prime CHINESE, characteristics of the Chinese stereotype following the prime BLACK, and characteristics of the criminal stereotype following the prime CRIMINAL. These expectancies were true most of the time. Participants then completed a lexical decision task in which SOA was manipulated (250 vs. 2,000 ms). Participants responded faster to semantically related targets (i.e., stereotypes) in the 250-ms SOA condition, regardless of their explicit expectancies. In the 2,000-ms SOA condition, participants responded faster to expected targets than to unexpected targets, regardless of whether or not the targets were semantically related to the primes. When the data from the two conditions were combined, the expectancy effect remained whereas the semantic relation effect did not. Results are discussed in terms of the automatic and controlled processing of social stimuli, and the importance of understanding expectancies in social stereotyping. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Lexical decision as an indirect test of memory: Repetition priming and list-wide priming as a function of type of encoding.

Two experiments examined priming in the lexical decision task, an indirect test of memory. Experiment 1 manipulated type of processing during study of unrelated word pairs. Recognition of individual words benefited more from semantic than from nonsemantic processing. Repetition priming in lexical decision depended on the context in which the target appeared. Targets preceded at test by unstudied primes showed greater repetition priming if processed nonsemantically during study; targets preceded at test by studied primes were not affected by type of processing at study. Interestingly, studied targets were facilitated more by studied than by unstudied primes regardless of whether the prime came from the same pair as the target. This list-wide episodic priming occurred under all four processing conditions in Experiment 1 (consonant counting, rote rehearsal, pleasantness rating, and sentence generation) with a 250-ms stimulus onset asynchrony. Experiment 2 showed that this list-wide episodic priming disappeared by 1,000 ms, suggesting that it had resulted from relatively transient activation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Mechanisms of unconscious priming: I. Response competition, not spreading activation.

Four experiments were conducted to replicate and expand upon A. G. Greenwald, S. C. Draine, and R. L. Abram's (1996) demonstration that unconsciously perceived priming words can influence judgments of other words. The present experiments manipulated 2 types of relationships between priming and target stimuli: (a) whether priming and target stimuli possess a preexisting semantic relationship (an affective relationship in Experiments 1, 2, and 4; an associative relationship in Experiment 3; and an animacy relationship in Experiment 4) and (b) whether the primes and targets produce the same response. Large priming effects were found only when the primes and targets possessed response compatibility. No residual effects for affective, animacy, or semantic relatedness were observed. Although these results strongly support the conclusion that word meaning can be unconsciously activated, they do not support the claim that the unconscious perception effects obtained in Greenwald et al.'s (1996) paradigm are caused by automatic spreading activation of word meaning. Instead, the results reported here are consistent with a claim that unconsciously perceived words automatically trigger response tendencies that facilitate or interfere with target responding. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Semantic priming in the lexical decision task: Roles of prospective prime-generated expectancies and retrospective semantic matching.

In semantic priming paradigms for lexical decisions, the probability that a word target is semantically related to its prime (the relatedness proportion) has been confounded with the probability that a target is a nonword, given that it is unrelated to its prime (the nonword ratio). This study unconfounded these two probabilities in a lexical decision task with category names as primes and with high- and low-dominance exemplars as targets. Semantic priming for high-dominance exemplars was modulated by the relatedness proportion and, to a lesser degree, by the nonword ratio. However, the nonword ratio exerted a stronger influence than did the relatedness proportion on semantic priming for low-dominance exemplars and on the nonword facilitation effect (i.e., the superiority in performance for nonword targets that follow a category name rather than a neutral XXX prime). These results suggest that semantic priming for lexical decisions is affected by both a prospective prime-generated expectancy, modulated by the relatedness proportion, and a retrospective target/prime semantic matching process, modulated by the nonword ratio. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Individual and developmental differences in semantic priming: Empirical and computational support for a single-mechanism account of lexical processing.

Existing accounts of single-word semantic priming phenomena incorporate multiple mechanisms, such as spreading activation, expectancy-based processes, and postlexical semantic matching. The authors provide empirical and computational support for a single-mechanism distributed network account. Previous studies have found greater semantic priming for low- than for high-frequency target words as well as inhibition following unrelated primes only at long stimulus-onset asynchronies (SOAs). A series of experiments examined the modulation of these effects by individual differences in age or perceptual ability. Third-grade, 6th-grade, and college students performed a lexical-decision task on high- and low-frequency target words preceded by related, unrelated, and nonword primes. Greater priming for low-frequency targets was exhibited only by participants with high perceptual ability. Moreover, unlike the college students, the children showed no inhibition even at the long SOA. The authors provide an account of these results in terms of the properties of distributed network models and support this account with an explicit computational simulation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Semantic priming after severe closed head trauma: Automatic and attentional processes.

The 2-process theory of semantic priming (J. H. Neely, 1977; M. I. Posner and C. R. Snyder, 1975) was used to determine the maintenance of automatic processes after severe closed head injury (CHI) and to determine whether processes that demand attention suffer a deficit. Ss with severe CHI (N?=?18,?>?2 yrs postinjury) and 18 matched control Ss completed a lexical decision task in which a category prime was followed by a target. Automatic and attentional priming were determined by orthogonally varying prime–target relatedness, expectancy, and stimulus onset asynchrony. Although the CHI Ss had slower reaction times (RTs) overall, there were no significant group differences in the magnitude of either the automatic or attentional component of semantic priming. The present results indicate the integrity of semantic processes and normal semantic priming in long-term patients with severe CHI. The results are discussed in relation to an attentional resource hypothesis. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Masked repetition and phonological priming in picture naming

We report a series of picture naming experiments in which target pictures were primed by briefly presented masked words. Experiment 1 demonstrates that the prior presentation of the same word prime (e.g., rose-ROSE) facilitates picture naming independently of the target's name frequency. In Experiment 2, primes that were homophones of picture targets (e.g., rows-ROSE) also produced facilitatory effects compared with unrelated controls, but priming was significantly larger for targets with low-frequency names relative to targets with high-frequency names. In Experiment 3, primes that were higher frequency homophones of picture targets produced facilitatory effects compared with identical primes. These results are discussed in relation to different accounts of the effects of masked priming in current models of picture naming.     

Effect of backward priming on word recognition in single-word and sentence contexts.

Backward priming was investigated under conditions similar to those used in lexical ambiguity research. Ss received prime-target word pairs that were associated either unidirectionally (BABY-STORK) or bidirectionally (BABY-CRY). In Exp 1, targets were presented 500 ms following the onset of visual primes, and Ss made naming or lexical decision responses to the targets. Forward priming was obtained in all conditions, while backward priming occurred only with lexical decision. In Exp 2, primes were presented auditorily, either in isolation or in a sentence. Targets followed the offset of the primes either immediately or after 200 ms. Backward priming occurred with both response tasks, but only when the prime was an isolated word. Backward priming decreased over time with the naming task, but not with lexical decision. These results suggest that the locus of the backward priming effect is different for the 2 response tasks. Results support a context-independent view of lexical access. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effets de la nature des relations sémantiques sur les processus d'activation entre amorces et cibles associativement liées.

Classical models of knowledge organization assume a structural and functional independence between lexical and semantic information. This independence is warranted by the fact that conceptual activation processes are assumed to be strategic, unlike intra-lexical processes which are automatic. Nevertheless, some experiments seem to show the existence of automatic processes for conceptually but not associatively linked pairs of words. The present experiments reverse the procedure usually used by testing the effect of the kind of conceptual relations in a lexical decision task on targets associatively linked to primes. The results show the existence of effects dependent on the nature of the semantic relations when only the associative strength was assumed to have an influence on priming. (English abstract) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Concreteness-dependent associative priming: Separate lexical organization for concrete and abstract words.

Four experiments used associated, unrelated, and neutral ({blank}–word) pairs that varied on prime and target concreteness. In Experiment 1, associated targets were named faster than neutral targets when primes and targets were homogeneous for concreteness (i.e., concrete–concrete or abstract–abstract), but not when they were heterogeneous (i.e., concrete–abstract or abstract–concrete). Experiments 2 and 3, using lexical decision, showed priming for all pairs irrespective of prime and target concreteness. In Experiment 4, the prime was presented for 16.7 ms, followed immediately by a 168-ms random letter mask. Lexical decision times showed priming similar to that in Experiment 1. If priming in Experiments 1 and 4 reflected lexical processes, whereas priming in Experiments 2 and 3 entailed postlexical processes, then lexical processes may be functionally distinct for concrete versus abstract words. These findings are more consistent with dual-coding than common-coding explanations of concreteness. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Early and late selection in unconscious information processing.

In four experiments, we investigated whether masked stimuli in priming experiments are subjected to early or to late selection. In Experiment 1, participants classified four target-pictures as being small or large. In line with early selection accounts, prime-pictures with a different perceptual appearance as the experienced targets did not elicit congruency effect. In Experiment 2, 40 targets all depicting animals were presented. Results were in line with late selections assumptions because novel animal primes but not novel primes from different semantic categories yielded congruency effects. In Experiment 3, the targets were chosen such that there is a second semantic feature that covaried with the required response. Here, novel primes picturing small animals did not influence target responses with regard to the instructed size classification, but with regard to their affiliation to the category animal. In Experiment 4, small and large pictures from two categories were presented. Category match did not influence priming, ruling out that feature overlap contaminated the former results. The results indicate that participants’ prestimulus expectations determine in which stage in the processing-stream masked stimuli are selected. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Theories of priming: II. Types of primes.

In 4 lexical-decision experiments, words were primed by associatively related words, unrelated words, neutral primes, or nonwords. The associative relations between the critical targets and the targets on preceding trials were also manipulated. The speed and the accuracy of responses were virtually identical in the unrelated-word, neutral, and nonword prime conditions. Between-trials semantic priming was the same size in all of these conditions. These results cause problems for non-spreading-activation (e.g., compound-cue) models of associative priming. These models predict either that neutral and nonword primes should facilitate or inhibit lexical decisions on the targets (with the direction of the effect dependent on specific assumptions) or that more between-trials priming should occur in these conditions relative to the unrelated-word prime condition. In contrast, the results are easily explained by spreading-activation models. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Repeated Masked Category Primes Interfere With Related Exemplars: New Evidence for Negative Semantic Priming.

In 4 experiments, the authors found evidence for negatively signed masked semantic priming effects (with category names as primes and exemplars as targets) using a new technique of presenting the masked primes. By rapidly interchanging prime and mask during the stimulus onset asynchrony, they increased the total prime exposure to a level comparable with that of a typical visible prime condition without increasing the number of participants having an awareness of the prime. The negative effect was observed for only low-dominance exemplars and not for high-dominance exemplars. The authors found it using lexical decision (Experiments 1 and 2), lexical decision with a response-window procedure (Experiment 3), and the pronunciation task (Experiment 4). The results are discussed with regard to different theories on semantic priming. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Negative priming from masked words: Retrospective prime clarification or center-surround inhibition?

Masked repetition and semantic priming effects were examined in 2 experiments. In Experiment 1, a masked-prime lexical decision task followed a phase of detection, semantic, or repetition judgments about masked words. In Experiment 2 participants made speeded pronunciations to target words after they tried to identify masked primes, and the proportion of semantically and identically related prime-target pairs was varied. Center-surround theory (T. H. Carr & D. Dagenbach, 1990; D. Dagenbach, T. H. Carr, & A. Wilhelmsen, 1989) predicts positive repetition priming but negative semantic priming when people attempt, but fail, to extract the meanings of masked words. A retrospective prime-clarification account, in contrast, predicts that semantic and repetition priming effects will vary (being positive or negative) as a function of expectations about the prime-target relation. The data support a retrospective prime-clarification account, which, unlike center-surround theory, correctly predicted negative repetition priming effects. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

"Nature of priming effects in semantic matching": Correction to Whitlow.

Reports an error in "Nature of priming effects in semantic matching" by J. W. Whitlow (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 1986[Jul], Vol 12[3], 353-360). The Appendix table was constructed incorrectly. The correct table appears in the erratum. (The following abstract of the original article appeared in record 1986-29114-001.) Studied priming effects in a semantic matching task that distinguished visually based matching processes from nominally and semantically based matching processes, using 24 undergraduates. Ss judged semantic matches for 3 types of word pairs: identical (e.g., robin-robin), same category (e.g., robin-sparrow), and different category (e.g., robin-truck). Visual matching was isolated by comparing performance between physical identity (e.g., robin-robin) and nominal identity (e.g., robin-ROBIN) pairs. Physical identity pairs, which allowed visually based matching, exhibited an interaction between priming and the typicality of category exemplars that was absent in nominal identity and same-category pairs. Priming had no effect on nominal identity pairs. For same-category pairs, which required semantically based matching, priming produced facilitation at all levels of typicality. The results bring the semantic matching paradigm into agreement with other procedures that show that priming facilitates processing for all related targets. Categories and exemplars used as stimulus materials are appended. (18 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Visual word recognition: Effort after meaning but not (necessarily) meaning after effort.

A robust semantic priming effect typically occurs in visual word recognition if the prime is read prior to a response to the target. M. C. Smith, D. Besner, and H. Miyoshi (1994) reported that this semantic priming effect is markedly reduced for short-duration primes randomly intermixed with longer duration primes, and they offered a signal-detection account of their results. This general finding is replicated and extended in 3 experiments, which demonstrate the importance of list context for this prime duration effect and suggest that a center-surround attentional mechanism provides a better account of the results to date. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)