The present paper describes two attempts to replicate a recent study of ours in the semantic priming domain (Heyman, Van Rensbergen, Storms, Hutchison, & De Deyne, 2015). In that study, we observed that semantic priming for forward associates (e.g., panda-bear) completely evaporated when participants' working memory was taxed, whereas backward (e.g., baby-stork) and symmetric associates (e.g., cat-dog) showed no ill-effects of a secondary task. This was the case for relatively long and short stimulus onset asynchronies (i.e., 1,200 ms and 200 ms, respectively). The results thus suggested that prospective target activation is, contrary to what some theories of semantic memory posit, not an automatic process. However, the two replication studies reported here cast serious doubt on this conclusion. A Bayesian analysis of all the available data indicated that there is at least substantial evidence for a priming effect in every condition, except for forward associates in the short SOA condition. The null hypothesis is still supported in the latter condition, though the replication studies weakened the evidence for a null effect. The theoretical implications of these findings are discussed.Keywords: semantic priming; automaticity; working memory; lexical decision IntroductionThe semantic priming effect is an often studied phenomenon by cognitive psychologists, presumably because it tells us something about the structure of semantic memory (among other things). It refers to the improvement in speed (and accuracy) when responding to a target stimulus that is preceded by a semantically related prime stimulus (see McNamara, 2005, for a review). For instance, people tend to recognize the word dog faster when they first see the related word cat. Over the years, several accounts of the semantic priming effect have been advanced, many of which were inspired by Collins and Loftus' (1975) spreading activation model of semantic processing. According to this model, conceptual knowledge is stored in a network of interconnected nodes, where each node corresponds to a concept (e.g., cat). If one processes a concept, for instance, by reading the word cat, the matching node gets activated and activation will spread to connected nodes, which entails that semantically related concepts such as dog are (partly) activated. A spreading activation mechanism can readily explain the semantic priming effect if one assumes that