プライム刺激に対する課題とリストの構成がプライミング効果に及ぼす影響

Abstract

Subjects made lexical decisions to word and nonword targets under two priming conditions. For a half of the subjects, the task for prime words was to make word associations, and for the other, to play shiritori, a Japanese word game in which a new word is generated using the last syllable of a prime word as its first syllable. A semantic priming effect was obtained for the association group, when 40 per cent of the stimulus-word list was semantically related prime-target pairs and 10 per cent orthographically related (SR-40 condition), but not when the list was 10 per cent of semantically related and 40 per cent orthographically related (OR-40 condition). An orthographic priming effect was obtained for the shiritori group in the OR-40 condition, but not in the SR-40 condition. The interaction effect seems to indicate that subject's expectancy played an important role in primed lexical decision, and the expectancy was affected not only by the stimulus-word list construction but also by the tasks for prime words. These findings were discussed in terms of the spreading activation theory that distinguishes automatic and expectancy-based processes.