Verb Generation Priming Involves Conceptual Implicit Memory

Abstract

Brain activation patterns differ and generation latencies are reduced when generating verbs to repeated nouns (Raichle et al., 1994). Amnesic participants show normal magnitude of priming (Seger et al., 1997). Despite its importance in neuropsychology, verb generation priming is not well characterized psychologically. Six behavioral studies found that verb generation priming was specific to the verb rather than to the noun or the noun–verb pair, was equivalent after overt or covert generation and after reading verbs or generating verbs, was affected by levels of processing, and transferred completely across languages in bilinguals. These results indicate that verb generation priming involves priming of particular responses and happens at a conceptual level. These findings provide new insights about the significance of brain imaging and neuropsychological studies involving verb generation priming.