Facilitation using personal associations in a lexical decision task.

Experimenters using the lexical decision task have reported that the processing of a word target is facilitated by the prior processing of a related word prime. Three experiments with 60 university students are reported that generalize this phenomenon to personal associative structures between randomly selected items. The magnitude of the effect from these personal associations was contrasted with the effect obtained from using the more usual high-frequency word pairs associated in a normative manner. There was no difference between the facilitation obtained for common or personal associates, regardless of whether testing was immediate or delayed. It is concluded that the structural/processing characteristics that cause the phenomenon can validly be assumed to be general throughout memory. (French abstract) (15 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)