Semantic interpretability does not influence masked priming effects

Abstract

Much of the recent masked nonword priming literature demonstrates no difference in priming between affixed and non-affixed nonword primes (e.g., maskity-MASK vs. maskond-MASK). A possible explanation for the absence of a difference is that studies have used affixed primes which were semantically uninterpretable. Therefore, this explanation indicates semantic interpretability plays a fundamental role in masked priming. To test this account, we conducted an experiment using the masked priming paradigm in the lexical decision task. We compared responses with targets which were preceded by one of four primes types: (1) interpretable affixed nonwords (e.g., maskless-MASK), (2) uninterpretable affixed nonwords (e.g., maskity-MASK), (3) non-affixed nonwords (e.g., maskond-MASK), and (4) unrelated words (e.g., tubeful-MASK). Our results follow the trend of finding no difference between affixed and non-affixed primes. Critically, however, we observed no difference in priming between uninterpretable and interpretable affixed primes. Thus, our results suggest that semantic interpretability does not influence masked priming.

Letter chunk frequency does not explain morphological masked priming

“…Compelling evidence for more sophisticated, model-based metrics comes from work on novel compounds , in which semantic effects are captured through compositional processes, an approach that paves the way for a more dynamic view of meaning-combination mechanisms in novel derived forms (Amenta, Günther, & Marelli, 2020). Nevertheless, in keeping with several previous studies (e.g., Giraudo & AFFIX FREQUENCY IN MASKED PRIMING 15 Voga, 2016;Longtin & Meunier, 2005;Tseng, Lindsay, & Davis, 2020), the present results suggest that masked priming is not much influenced by semantic effects, at least with derived nonword primes (see, e.g., Feldman & Basnight-Brown, 2008;Feldman, Kostić, Gvozdenović, O'Connor, & del Prado Martın, 2012, for a somewhat different perspective with word primes). More generally, these data suggest a weak relationship between the mechanisms captured by masked priming, and the lexical-semantic dynamics induced by the same nonwords when presented overtly, as target items.…”

Letter chunk frequency does not explain morphological masked priming

“…Compelling evidence for more sophisticated, model-based metrics comes from work on novel compounds , in which semantic effects are captured through compositional processes, an approach that paves the way for a more dynamic view of meaning-combination mechanisms in novel derived forms (Amenta, Günther, & Marelli, 2020). Nevertheless, in keeping with several previous studies (e.g., Longtin & Meunier, 2005;Giraudo & Voga, 2016;Tseng, Lindsay, & Davis, 2020), the present results suggest that masked priming is not much influenced by semantic effects, at least with derived nonword primes (see, e.g., Feldman & Basnight-Brown, 2008;Feldman, Kostić, Gvozdenović, O'Connor, & del Prado Martýn, 2012, for a somewhat different perspective with word primes). More generally, these data suggest a weak relationship between the mechanisms captured by masked priming, and the lexical-semantic dynamics induced by the same nonwords when presented overtly, as target items.…”