Semantic priming and retrieval from lexical memory: Evidence for facilitatory and inhibitory processes

Abstract

Immediately prior to each visually presented target letter string to which the subject made a speeded word-nonword classification response, a visually presented prime to which no overt response was required was shown for 360, 600, or 2,000 msee. For word (W) target trials, the priming event was either a semantically neutral warning signal (Condition NX), a word semantically related to the target word (Condition R), or a word semantically unrelated to the target word (Condition U); for nonword (N) target trials, the priming event was either the neutral warning signal (Condition NX) or a word prime (Condition WP). For the W target trials, reaction times (RTs) were slower in Condition U than in Condition NX and equally so for all three prime durations; RTs were faster in Condition R than in Condition NX and to a greater degree for the 600-and 2,OOO-msec prime durations than for the 360-msec prime duration. For the N targets, RTs were faster in Condition WP than in Condition NX and equally so for all prime durations. These results were interpreted within the framework of a two-factor theory of attention proposed by Posner and Snyder (1975a).In the lexical decision task, a subject must decide as quickly as possible whether a visually presented letter string is a common English word or nonword. A commonly obtained finding (e.g., Meyer & Schvaneveldt, 1971; Meyer, Schvaneveldt, & Ruddy, Note 1) is that subjects are quicker to respond that a target letter string (e.g., NURSE) is a word when the immediately prior target was a semantically related word (i.e., DOCTOR) than when the immediately prior target was a semantically unrelated word (e.g., BREAD). Schvaneveldt and Meyer (1973) have proposed two models, each of which can account for this semantic-facilitation effect. Both models share the assumption that, in terms of a spatial metaphor, the logogens for semantically related words are located nearer each other in semantic memory than are the logogens for semantically unrelated words (cf. Morton, 1970). According to the spreading excitation model, when a stimulus word activates its logogen, this activation spreads to adjacent, semantically related logogens but not to remote, semantically unrelated logogens. Thus, if a word that is to be processed is presented before there has been a complete decay of the logogen activation produced by a previously presented semantically related word, the activation level in the logogen of the to-be-processed word will initially be higher (due to the activation that has spread to it) than it would This research was supported by Grant 4031 OX to Dr. Michael 1. Posner from the National Science Foundation and was conducted while Dr. Posner was a Visiting Professor at Yale and while the author was a National Science Foundation predoctoral fellow. 1 am indebted to Dr. Robert G. Crowder, Dr. Alice F. Healy, and Dr. Posner for several interesting discussions about this research. Requests for reprints should be sent to the author, who is now at the Department of Psychology, University of Sout...

Out of one’s mind: A study of involuntary semantic memories

“…Thus, the effects of repetition priming studied in the laboratory, particularly with tasks that require the production of target stimuli, are usually short lived and do not last longer than few hours (e.g., Graf & Mandler, 1984;Squire, Shimamura, & Graf, 1985) or few days (e.g., Sloman, Hayman, Ohta, Law, & Tulving, 1988;Tulving, Schacter, & Stark, 1982; but see Tulving, Hayman, & Macdonald, 1991). 9 As to the effects of semantic priming, they can be dramatically reduced or even Specifically, when the spreading of activation in a semantic network is studied in laboratory, the prime/target pairs that are used are almost always the abstract names of categories and category exemplars (e.g., Bird-Robin) or names of associatively related concepts (e.g., Doctor-Nurse) (see e.g., Neely, 1976). Our results show that this type of activation does occur in the course of everyday life.…”

“…For example, in semantic priming experiments such indirect activations have been assessed by measuring reaction times (in a lexical decision task) to target words which are semantically related to previously presented primes (e.g., Fischler, 1977;Neely, 1976;. In addition, there are several other lines of research which have shown that automatic activation of related information in response to a target word can exert strong effects on performance in such different tasks as free recall and recognition (Mandler, & Rabinowitz, 1981;Roediger, & McDermott, 1995), cued recall (Nelson et al, 1998), implicit memory tasks (McDermott, 1997), reading and text comprehension (Kintsch, 1988;Sharkey, & Mitchell, 1985).…”

Semantic disturbance in schizophrenia and its relationship to the cognitive neuroscience of attention

“…Words are represented as networks of interconnected nodes, with either a one-to-one representation of a word and a node or a distributed representation of various word features and selected sets of nodes. Presentation of a word activates its lexical representation, with activation spreading automatically or obligatorily to other related lexical entries (Collins and Loftus, 1975;Neely, 1976). Various word features, such as orthographic, phonological and semantic are represented in the lexicon, but the most powerful determinant of processing are semantic representations of concepts of corresponding words, which is the heart of language (Fischler, 1997).…”

Parafoveal information is not sufficient to produce semantic or visual priming

“…The neutral primes consisted of a row of uppercase Xs (e.g., XXXX-eggs) and were used to determine whether the effects of the three other prime types should be attributed to costs or benefits (Neely, 1976;Posner & Snyder, 1975). The number of Xs in the neutral primes was either four or five, depending on the number of letters in the target.…”