Semantic Priming in the Lexical Decision Task Roles of Prospective Prime-Generated Expectancies and Retrospective Semantic Matching

• Published in: Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition Vol. 15; no. 6; pp. 1003 - 1019
• Main Authors: Neely, James H, Keefe, Dennis E, Ross, Kent L
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States American Psychological Association 01-11-1989
• Subjects: Attention; Cues; Decision Making; Expectations; Human; Humans; Lexical Decision; Memory; Mental Recall; Paired-Associate Learning; Priming; Psychology; Semantics; Set (Psychology); Social research
• ISSN: 0278-7393; 1939-1285
• DOI: 10.1037/0278-7393.15.6.1003

In semantic priming paradigms for lexical decisions, the probability that a word target is semantically related to its prime (the relatedness proportion) has been confounded with the probability that a target is a nonword, given that it is unrelated to its prime (the nonword ratio). This study unconfounded these two probabilities in a lexical decision task with category names as primes and with high- and low-dominance exemplars as targets. Semantic priming for high-dominance exemplars was modulated by the relatedness proportion and, to a lesser degree, by the nonword ratio. However, the nonword ratio exerted a stronger influence than did the relatedness proportion on semantic priming for low-dominance exemplars and on the nonword facilitation effect (i.e., the superiority in performance for nonword targets that follow a category name rather than a neutral XXX prime). These results suggest that semantic priming for lexical decisions is affected by both a prospective prime-generated expectancy, modulated by the relatedness proportion, and a retrospective target/prime semantic matching process, modulated by the nonword ratio.