Do Visible Semantic Primes Preactivate Lexical Representations?

Considerable research effort has been devoted to investigating semantic priming effects, particularly, the locus of those effects. Semantically related primes might activate their target's lexical representation (through automatic spreading activation at short stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs)...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition memory, and cognition, 2020-08, Vol.46 (8), p.1533-1569
Main Authors: Taikh, Alexander, Lupker, Stephen J.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adult
Association
Computer Assisted Testing
Concepts
Cues
Decision Making
Decision Making - physiology
Error Patterns
Female
Human
Humans
Language Processing
Lexical Access
Lexical processing
Lexical semantics
Linguistics
Male
Masking
Nonwords
Orthographic similarity
Orthography
Pattern Recognition, Visual - physiology
Perceptual Masking - physiology
Priming
Psycholinguistics
Reading
Semantic Priming
Semantics
Stimulus Onset
Task Analysis
Undergraduate Students
Word Recognition
Young Adult
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Summary:Considerable research effort has been devoted to investigating semantic priming effects, particularly, the locus of those effects. Semantically related primes might activate their target's lexical representation (through automatic spreading activation at short stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs), or through generation of words expected to follow the prime at longer SOAs). Alternately, semantically related primes might aid responding after target identification (i.e., postlexically). In contrast, masked orthographic priming effects appear to be lexical and automatic. Lexical processing of targets is facilitated by orthographically similar nonword primes and often inhibited by orthographically similar word primes (Davis & Lupker, 2006). Using the lexical-decision task (LDT), we found additivity between the facilitative effects of visible semantic primes and the facilitative effects of masked orthographically similar nonword primes at long and short SOAs, consistent with a postlexical locus of the semantic priming effects. Also consistent with this conclusion, semantic primes affected the skew of the distribution (larger effects on longer latency trials), whereas masked orthographic primes did not. In a final experiment, visible primes that were semantically related to the masked orthographic word primes did not make those primes more effective lexical inhibitors of orthographically similar targets (independent of SOA). Taken together, our findings suggest that the impact of a semantic prime is not to increase the lexical activation of related concepts. Rather, they suggest that the locus of semantic priming effects in LDTs is postlexical, in that discovering the existence of a relationship between the prime and target biases participants to make a "word" response.
ISSN:0278-7393
1939-1285
DOI:10.1037/xlm0000825