Long-Term Semantic Priming of Word Meaning

Three experiments investigated facilitation in synonym decisions as a function of prior synonym decision trials that were either identical or semantically related. Experiment 1 demonstrated that semantically related prime trials produced less facilitation than identical prime trials, but facilitatio...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition memory, and cognition, 2010-11, Vol.36 (6), p.1510-1528
Main Author: Woltz, Dan J
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adolescent
Adult
Association
Biological and medical sciences
Confidence Intervals
Decision Making
Experimental psychology
Female
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
Human
Humans
Language
Language Usage
Long term
Male
Memory
Memory - physiology
Middle Aged
Miscellaneous
Neuropsychological Tests
Photic Stimulation - methods
Priming
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychology. Psychophysiology
Reaction Time - physiology
Semantic Priming
Semantics
Synonyms
Task Analysis
Vocabulary
Word Meaning
Young Adult
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Summary:Three experiments investigated facilitation in synonym decisions as a function of prior synonym decision trials that were either identical or semantically related. Experiment 1 demonstrated that semantically related prime trials produced less facilitation than identical prime trials, but facilitation from both persisted over 14 intervening trials. Experiments 2 and 3 demonstrated that word meaning retrieval without meaning comparison in prime trials was sufficient for persistent facilitation in semantically related targets, and meaning comparison was necessary for repetition priming to show greater facilitation than semantic priming. Results suggest that semantic priming in this task may solely reflect strength changes in abstract semantic representations, whereas repetition priming may reflect additional nondeclarative memory for operations performed in prime events. (Contains 13 footnotes, 3 figures and 5 tables.)
ISSN:0278-7393
1939-1285
DOI:10.1037/a0021039