The authors assessed immediate repetition effects on event-related potentials (ERPs) while participants performed familiarity decisions for written personal names. For immediately repeated familiar names, the authors observed 3 distinct ERP modulations. At 180 -220 ms, a posterior N200 effect occurred for names preceded by same-font primes only. In addition, an increased left temporal negativity (N250r, 220 -300 ms) and a reduced central-parietal negativity (N400, 300 -400 ms) were seen both for same-font and different-font repetitions. In a 2nd experiment, when names were preceded by either their corresponding face or the face of a different celebrity, only the N400 effect was preserved. These findings suggest that the N200, N250r, and N400 effects reflect facilitated processing at font-specific featural, lexical, and semantic levels of processing, respectively.Priming can be described as a facilitation in stimulus processing that is induced by prior exposure to an identical or highly related stimulus. Priming paradigms have been used to explore cognitive operations engaged during the processing of commonly encountered stimuli such as words (e.g
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