The onset and time course of semantic priming during rapid recognition of visual words.

Abstract

In two experiments, we assessed the effects of response latency and task-induced goals on the onset and time course of semantic priming during rapid processing of visual words as revealed by ocular response tasks. In Experiment 1 (Ocular Lexical Decision Task), participants performed a lexical decision task using eye-movement responses on a sequence of four words. In Experiment 2, the same words were encoded for an episodic recognition memory task that did not require a meta-linguistic judgment. For both tasks, survival analyses showed that the earliest-observable effect (Divergence Point or DP) of semantic priming on target-word reading times occurred at approximately 260 ms, and ex-Gaussian distribution fits revealed that the magnitude of the priming effect increased as a function of response time. Together, these distributional effects of semantic priming suggest that the influence of the prime increases when target processing is more effortful. This effect does not require that the task include a metalinguistic judgment; manipulation of the task goals across experiments affected the overall response speed but not the location of the DP or the overall distributional pattern of the priming effect. These results are more readily explained as the result of a retrospective rather than a prospective priming mechanism and are consistent with compound-cue models of semantic priming.

Survival analyses reveal how early phonological processing affects eye movements during reading.

“…This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly. Reingold, 2012b), and lexical ambiguity (e.g., 139 ms, Sheridan & Reingold, 2012a), and earlier than estimates for the effect of semantic priming (e.g., 260 ms, Hoedemaker & Gordon, 2017).…”

“…Although survival analyses are typically conducted on first fixation data, it can also be useful to examine the divergence point estimates that are obtained when survival analyses are instead conducted on gaze duration data (e.g., Hoedemaker & Gordon, 2017). First fixation duration data contain a mixture of single fixations and first of multiple fixations (i.e., a fixation followed by an immediate refixation on the same word).…”

Print exposure modulates the effects of repetition priming during sentence reading

“…This highlights a key advantage to our use of eye tracking in the current study as compared to the lexical-decision task used in most word-recognition priming studies. The first-pass reading-time measures that showed significant repetition-by-ART interactions ranged between 200 and 250 ms (see Table 1), whereas lexical decision times tend to range between 500 and 600 ms (e.g., Andrews & Lo, 2013; Tan & Yap, 2016; see Hoedemaker & Gordon, 2014, in press, for discussion of how the long response times in manual lexical-decision tasks affect patterns of semantic priming). The much shorter durations of eye-tracking measures compared to lexical decision latencies supports our assertion that the repetition effects we observed reflect lexical retrieval processes rather than mechanisms related to episodic memory.…”

Spatial and semantic regularities produce interactive effects in early stages of visual orientation

“…Because saccades to surprising locations were associated with the slowest latencies, we investigated whether the determining factor was location-surprisal or the time to execute the saccade. We performed this analysis because prior eye-tracking studies have shown that top-down modulations such as implementing top-down control, integration of stimulus-value information, or impact of semantic priming are more strongly reflected in slower than faster saccades (e.g., Van Zoest & Donk, 2008; Schütz et al, 2012; Hoedemaker & Gordon, 2017). We performed median splits on saccade-latency distributions for saccades to surprising, expected, and non-regular locations.…”