Does<Emphasis Type="SmallCaps">LGHT</Emphasis> prime<Emphasis Type="SmallCaps">DARK</Emphasis>? Masked associative priming with addition neighbors

We present two masked priming lexical decision experiments in which we examined whether a nonword prime word would activate associative/semantic information from its corresponding addition neighbor (e.g.,lght-DARK via the addition neighborlight), producing associative/semantic priming. The rationale was the following: If a nonword prime with a missing letter produced a semantic/associative priming effect, this would clearly indicate that this nonword was activating the lexical/semantic representations of its base word, thereby reinforcing the models of visual-word recognition in which the orthographic representations produced bylght (orligt) andlight are quite similar (e.g., SOLAR, SERIOL, open-bigram, and overlap models). The results showed that the magnitude of the masked associative priming effect with subset primes was remarkably similar to that of the priming effect with the corresponding word prime. Furthermore, the magnitude of the associative priming effect was similar when the deleted letter was a vowel and when the deleted letter was a consonant.     

With a letter-searched prime, boat primes float but swim and coat don't: further evidence for automatic semantic activation

Letter search (LS) on the prime typically eliminates semantic priming (swim-float) and orthographic/phonological (O/P) priming (coat-float) but not morphological priming (marked-mark). However, LS on the prime does not reduce semantic priming for low-frequency targets (Tse & Neely, 2007). These findings suggest that semantic activation survives LS but decays during LS to a low level that can be detected only with sensitive measures, which are afforded by low-frequency targets and morphologically related primes and targets. In the present research, we show that LS on the prime results in 0 msec of semantic priming (e.g., swim-float) and 11 msec of O/P priming (e.g., coat-float), both of which are statistically null, whereas the LS semantic+O/P priming effect for primes and targets that do not share a morpheme (e.g., boat-float) is a robust 37 msec. Discussion focuses on the automaticity of semantic activation and whether morphological priming is mediated by (1) a morphemic representation that is separate from semantic representations or (2) activation combined from semantics and orthography/phonology.     

Reading “glasses” will prime “vision,” but reading a pair of “glasses” will not

In a lexical decision task with two primes and a target, the target was preceded 300 msec by the second prime (P2) which in turn was preceded by a brief forward and backward masked first prime (P1). When P1 and P2 were unrelated, reaction times were faster when the target was related to P2 (e.g.,wave SALT ... pepper) than when the target was unrelated to P2 (and P1—e.g.,wave LOAN ... pepper). However, this semantic priming effect was reduced to statistically nonsignificant levels when P1 and P2 were repetitions of the same word. That is, priming did not occur forsalt SALT ... pepper relative toloan LOAN ... pepper. This reduction in priming was observed whether P2 and the target were strongly or weakly related. These findings raise problems for current accounts of semantic priming.     

The effect of depressed mood on the interpretation of ambiguity,with and without negative mood induction

Is there an effect of depressed mood on the interpretation of ambiguity? Are depressed individuals biased to interpret ambiguous information in a negative manner? We used a cross-modal semantic priming task to look for evidence of a negative interpretative bias. Participants listened to ambiguous prime sentences (e.g., Joan was stunned by her final exam mark) and made lexical decisions to target words presented immediately after the sentence offset or after a delay of 1000 ms or 2000 ms. For the semantically related targets, the target was negatively related (distress), positively related (success), or neutrally related (grades) to the ambiguous prime. The experiment was conducted with and without a negative mood induction. The expectation was that depressed participants would be more likely to consider the negative interpretations of the ambiguous primes and would therefore experience larger priming effects for negatively related targets. Although there were large priming effects for all semantically related targets, there was no evidence of a negative interpretative bias.     

The role of form and meaning in the processing of written morphology: A priming study in French developing readers

Three visual priming experiments using three different prime durations (60 ms in Experiment 1, 250 ms in Experiment 2, and 800 ms in Experiment 3) were conducted to examine which properties of morphemes (form and/or meaning) drive developing readers’ processing of written morphology. French third, fifth, and seventh graders and adults (the latter as a control group) performed lexical decision tasks in which targets were preceded by morphological (e.g., tablette–TABLE, “little table–table”), pseudoderived (e.g., baguette–BAGUE, “little stick–ring”), orthographic control (e.g., abricot–ABRI, “apricot–shelter”), and semantic control (e.g., Tulipe–FLEUR, “tulip–flower”) primes. Across all groups, different patterns of priming were observed in both morphological and orthographic/semantic control conditions, suggesting that they all process morphemes as units when reading. In developing readers, the processing of written morphology is triggered by the form properties of morphemes, and their semantic properties are activated later in the time course of word recognition. In adults, patterns of priming were similar except that the activation of the form properties of morphemes decreased earlier in the time course of word recognition. Taken together, these findings indicate that French developing readers process both the form and meaning properties of morphemes when reading and support a progressive quantitative change in the development of morphological processing over the course of reading development.     

The contribution of prefixes to morphological processing of Spanish words

Three series of priming experiments were conducted to probe the morphological and phonological contributions to visual word recognition in Spanish. Prefixed, e.g., INCAPAZ (incapable), and pseudoprefixed, e.g., INDUSTRIA (industry) target words were presented for recognition following a prefixed, e.g., infeliz (unhappy), or pseudoprefixed, e.g., insulto (insult), prime starting with the same syllable as the target, at masked short or long stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs). At long SOAs the recognition of prefixed targets was facilitated by prefixed primes and inhibited by pseudoprefixed ones, whereas both prefixed and pseudoprefixed primes facilitated the recognition at short SOAs. In contrast, the recognition of pseudoprefixed targets was unaffected by the kind of prime presented, even when we used pairs of words overlapping in syllables that cannot be prefixes in Spanish. These results support a special status for morphological elements in access to meaning in reading.     

Semantic priming of familiar songs

We explored the functional organization of semantic memory for music by comparing priming across familiar songs both within modalities (Experiment 1, tune to tune; Experiment 3, category label to lyrics) and across modalities (Experiment 2, category label to tune; Experiment 4, tune to lyrics). Participants judged whether or not the target tune or lyrics were real (akin to lexical decision tasks). We found significant priming, analogous to linguistic associative-priming effects, in reaction times for related primes as compared to unrelated primes, but primarily for within-modality comparisons. Reaction times to tunes (e.g., “Silent Night”) were faster following related tunes (“Deck the Hall”) than following unrelated tunes (“God Bless America”). However, a category label (e.g., Christmas) did not prime tunes from within that category. Lyrics were primed by a related category label, but not by a related tune. These results support the conceptual organization of music in semantic memory, but with potentially weaker associations across modalities.     

Automatic semantic feedback during visual word recognition

Four experiments were conducted to determine whether semantic feedback spreads to orthographic and/or phonological representations during visual word recognition and whether such feedback occurs automatically. Three types of prime-target word pairs were used within the mediated-priming paradigm: (1) homophonically mediated (e.g., frog-[toad]-towed), (2) orthographically mediated (e.g., frog-[toad]-told), and (3) associatively related (e.g., frog-toad). Using both brief (53 msec; Experiment 1) and long (413 msec; Experiment 3) prime exposure durations, significant facilitatory-priming effects were found in the response time data with orthographically, but not homophonically, mediated prime-target word pairs. When the prime exposure duration was shortened to 33 msec in Experiment 4, however, facilitatory priming was absent with both orthographically and homophonically mediated word pairs. In addition, with a brief (53-msec) prime exposure duration, direct-priming effects were found with associatively (e.g., frog-toad), orthographically (e.g., toad-told), and homophonically (e.g., toad-towed) related word pairs in Experiment 2. Taken together, these results indicate that following the initial activation of semantic representations, activation automatically feeds back to orthographic, but not phonological, representations during the early stages of word processing. These findings were discussed in the context of current accounts of visual word recognition.     

Are individual differences in masked repetition and semantic priming reliable?

Despite the robustness of semantic priming (e.g., cat–DOG), the test-retest and internal reliabilities of semantic priming effects within individuals are surprisingly low. In contrast, repetition priming (e.g., dog–DOG) appears to be far more reliable across a range of conditions. While Stolz and colleagues attribute the low reliability in semantic priming to uncoordinated automatic processes in semantic memory, their use of unmasked priming paradigms makes it difficult to fully rule out the influence of strategic processes. In the present study, we explored the reliability of semantic and repetition priming when primes were heavily masked and cannot be consciously processed. We found that masked repetition, but not semantic, priming effects showed some degree of reliability. Interestingly, skilled lexical processors (as reflected by vocabulary knowledge and spelling ability) also produced larger masked repetition priming effects.     

Semantic priming in the name retrieval of objects and famous faces

Researchers interested in face processing have recently debated whether access to the name of a known person occurs in parallel with retrieval of semantic‐biographical codes, rather than in a sequential fashion. Recently, Schweinberger, Burton, and Kelly (2001) took a failure to obtain a semantic context effect in a manual syllable judgment task on names of famous faces as support for this position. In two experiments, we compared the effects of visually presented categorically related prime words with either objects (e.g. prime: animal; target: dog) or faces of celebrities (e.g. prime: actor; target: Bruce Willis) as targets. Targets were either manually categorized with regard to the number of syllables (as in Schweinberger et al.), or they were overtly named. For neither objects nor faces was semantic priming obtained in syllable decisions; crucially, however, priming was obtained when objects and faces were overtly named. These results suggest that both face and object naming are susceptible to semantic context effects.     

Center-surround or spreading inhibition: which mechanism caused the negative effect from repeated masked semantic primes?

In the paradigm of repeated masked semantic priming (Wentura & Frings. 2005), prime and mask are repeatedly and rapidly interchanged. Using this technique in a semantic priming task with category labels as primes and category exemplars as targets (related, e.g.. BIRD - swan --> BIRD - finch; unrelated, e.g., BIRD - lily --> FRUIT - finch), Wentura and Frings found a negatively signed priming effect. Here we used the repeated masking technique with category exemplars as targets and primes (i.e., identity priming) for analyzing, whether this effect reflects center-surround or spreading inhibition. If the repeated masked technique reflects spreading inhibition, a negative effect should also appear for identity priming. In contrast, a center-surround approach would predict a positive effect. In accordance with the latter hypothesis, we found a significant positive effect in identity priming (Experiment 1a) and significant difference to the negatively signed semantic priming effect when primes were category labels (Experiment 1b). This is indicative of the repeated masked semantic priming effect being a negatively signed semantic priming effect due to a center-surround mechanism.     

The (un)reliability of item-level semantic priming effects

Many researchers have tried to predict semantic priming effects using a myriad of variables (e.g., prime–target associative strength or co-occurrence frequency). The idea is that relatedness varies across prime–target pairs, which should be reflected in the size of the priming effect (e.g., cat should prime dog more than animal does). However, it is only insightful to predict item-level priming effects if they can be measured reliably. Thus, in the present study we examined the split-half and test–retest reliabilities of item-level priming effects under conditions that should discourage the use of strategies. The resulting priming effects proved extremely unreliable, and reanalyses of three published priming datasets revealed similar cases of low reliability. These results imply that previous attempts to predict semantic priming were unlikely to be successful. However, one study with an unusually large sample size yielded more favorable reliability estimates, suggesting that big data, in terms of items and participants, should be the future for semantic priming research.     

Associative and phonological priming effects after letter search on the prime

Responses to target words typically are faster and more accurate after associatively related primes (e.g., "orange-juice") than after unrelated primes (e.g., "glue-juice"). This priming effect has been used as an index of semantic activation, and its elimination often is cited as evidence against semantic access. When participants are asked to perform a letter search on the prime, associative priming typically is eliminated, but repetition and morphological priming remain. It is possible that priming survives letter search when it arises from activity in codes that are represented before semantics. This experiment examined associative and phonological priming to determine whether priming from phonologically related rhymes would remain after letter search (e.g., "moose-juice"; rhyming items were orthographically dissimilar). When participants read the primes, equivalent associative and phonological priming effects were obtained; both effects were eliminated after letter search. The impact of letter search on semantic and phonological access and implications for the structural arrangement of lexical and semantic memory are discussed.     

Anterior temporal cortex and semantic memory: Reconciling findings from neuropsychology and functional imaging

Studies of semantic impairment arising from brain disease suggest that the anterior temporal lobes are critical for semantic abilities in humans; yet activation of these regions is rarely reported in functional imaging studies of healthy controls performing semantic tasks. Here, we combined neuropsychological and PE T functional imaging data to show that when healthy subjects identify concepts at a specific level, the regions activated correspond to the site of maximal atrophy in patients with relatively pure semantic impairment. The stimuli were color photographs of common animals or vehicles, and the task was category verification at specific (e.g., robin), intermediate (e.g., bird), or general (e.g., animal) levels. Specific, relative to general, categorization activated the antero-lateral temporal cortices bilaterally, despite matching of these experimental conditions for difficulty. Critically, in patients with atrophy in precisely these areas, the most pronounced deficit was in the retrieval of specific semantic information.     

Inhibition from semantically related primes: Evidence of a category-specific inhibition

The phenomenon of inhibition from generating successive items within a category, reported by A. S. Brown (1981), was examined in two experiments. Subjects responded on target trials by either generating targets (e.g., generating BASS to B when it followed the category name FISH, Experiment 1) or reading them (reading BASS when it followed the category name FISH, Experiment 2). Prior to target trials, all subjects received priming trials consisting of either one or four exemplars from a single semantic category, which could be either the same category as the target’s category (related priming condition) or an unrelated category (unrelated priming condition). In both experiments, different groups of subjects either read or generated primes. When primes were read, target response times (RTs) were always facilitated in the related priming condition compared with in the unrelated priming condition. However, when primes were generated, this facilitation from related primes was eliminated, except in the one-prime condition, when targets were also generated. When primes and targets were both generated, RTs in the related priming condition were slower following four primes than following one prime. Thus, category-specific inhibition from multiple related primes is greatest when both primes and targets must be actively retrieved.     

Redundancy gain for semantic features

In a go/no-go experiment, semantic redundancy gain was assessed for responses to single written words. Specifically, we asked participants to respond only to words whose meaning matched at least one semantic target feature—that is, the target category (e.g., animal), the target color (e.g., gray), or both. On redundant-target trials, the word (e.g., elephant) matched both semantic target features (i.e., gray and animal). On single-target trials, the word (e.g., beaver) matched one target feature (i.e., animal) and a nontarget feature (i.e., brown). We observed shorter reaction times in the redundant-target condition than in the faster single-target condition. Hence, the present study provides the first evidence that redundancy gain is not limited to responses to redundant proximal stimulus features but can also be observed for responses to semantic feature information.     

Processing polysemous words in context: Evidence for interrelated meanings

Two experiments are reported which examined whether the various meanings of polysemous adjectives (e.g.,firm as insolid orfirm as instrict) are functionally independent during language comprehension. In Experiment 1 a priming technique was used, similar to that which has been used to investigate the processing of homonyms, to test whether alternative meanings of polysemous words become active even if they are irrelevant in the context. The results showed that this was only reliably the case for central meanings of the words (eg.,firm as insolid), for which effects were found as much as 1100 msec after prime onset. No significant priming of targets related to noncentral meanings (eg.,firm as instrict) was obtained in irrelevant contexts. This happened despite the fact that both types of target were equally primed when the prime occurred in isolation. Experiment 2 obtained similar results using a relatedness judgment task. The asymmetrical priming of central and noncentral targets in irrelevant contexts is discussed in terms of a hierarchical meaning structure relating the diverse uses of polysemous words.     

Semantic transparency and masked morphological priming: The case of prefixed words

In four lexical decision experiments, we investigated masked morphological priming with Dutch prefixed words. Reliable effects of morphological relatedness were obtained with visual primes and visual targets in the absence of effects due to pure form overlap. In certain conditions, priming effects were significantly greater with semantically transparent prefixed primes (e.g., rename-name) relative to the priming effects obtained with semantically opaque prefixed words (e.g., relate-late), even with very brief (40-msec) prime durations. With visual primes and auditory targets (cross-modal priming), significant facilitation was found in all related prime conditions, independent of whether or not primes were morphologically related to targets. The results are interpreted within a bimodal hierarchical model of word recognition in which morphological effects arise through the interplay of sublexical (morpho-orthographic) and supralexical (morpho-semantic) representations. The word stimuli from this study may be downloaded as supplemental materials from http://mc.psychonomic-journals .org/content/supplemental.     

Dissociative effects of phonological vs. semantic associates on recognition memory in the Deese/Roediger-McDermott paradigm

Using a variation of the Deese/Roediger–McDermott paradigm in four experiments, we examined hit rate, false alarm rate, and memory discriminability (d′) for critical items (e.g., sleep) after their semantic associates (e.g., dream, rest, and awake), phonological associates (e.g., bleep, sheep, and cheap) or unrelated items were studied. Replicating previous research (e.g., Neely & Tse, 2007), d′ was lower for critical items than for yoked associates in semantic lists. However, d′ was higher for critical items than for yoked associates in phonological lists, even when the same critical items were used for these two list types. The memory discriminability of critical items was enhanced by phonological lists via a larger increase in their hit rates than in their false alarm rates, relative to the same critical items in lists of unrelated words. These findings (a) could not be fully accounted for by the activation-based theories proposed in the false memory literature, and (b) may suggest that the memory discriminabilities of semantic and phonological lists are modulated by two distinct activation mechanisms.