Semantic Context Effects on Visual Word Processing: A Hybrid Prospective-Retrospective Processing Theory

Abstract

Publisher Summary This chapter describes a hybrid prospective–retrospective theory of the way semantic context influences word recognition. This theory postulates the operation of two prospective priming mechanisms, expectancy and spreading activation, and one retrospective priming mechanism, a check for target-prime relatedness. There are four important ways in which hybrid prospective–retrospective theory of semantic priming promotes the understanding of the way semantic context influences the processes that mediate word recognition in lexical decision and pronunciation tasks. First, it uncovers the rather potent effects of a variable—the nonword ratio—that has heretofore been ignored in the analyses of semantic priming effects in the lexical decision task. Second, the theory suggests that an effect that has often been ignored and considered as a nuisance—the nonword facilitation effect—may actually be an important signature of the operation of a mechanism, the retrospective semantic matching mechanism, that can have a major influence on priming in the lexical decision task. Third, the hybrid prospective–retrospective theory of priming provides guidance as to whether a lexical decision or pronunciation task should be used to study the effects of semantic context. The fourth feature of the present theory is that it provides an integrative account of several diverse phenomena that have come to light in the heavily researched area of semantic context effects on word recognition.