| Abstract: | The processing of a word is sometimes affected if earlier words are semantically related to it (semantic “priming”). Priming phenomena have generally been interpreted as reflecting the organization of the mental lexicon. Past studies have shown that priming effects have a very fast rise time and a relatively rapid decay time. This paper investigates the rate of decay of semantic facilitation in both sentences and lists. It was hypothesized that sentence processing involves the construction of a discourse model in which the main topics stay active. If true, then words referring to related objects or events will be processed rapidly even if they occur later in the input, i.e., there will be no decay of facilitation. Three experiments with college students examined the relative time to process a critical word when it was preceded by either a pair of semantically related words or more neutral words. The materials occurred in either sentences or lists, the latter being word-level anagrams of the sentences. Subjects carried out the phonememonitoring task, responding to a word-initial target phoneme that occurred immediately after the critical word. In Experiments I (N = 58) and II (N = 40) 12 words separated the related/neutral words and the critical items. Facilitation in processing the critical word was present in sentences but not in lists. Experiment III (N = 128) showed that the amount of facilitation in sentences was the same when 12 words separated the related/neutral and critical words as when 1.5 words separated them. Thus, there was no evidence obtained here for decay of facilitation in sentences. The results are taken to be consistent with a discourse-model interpretation of semantic facilitation in sentences. |
