With a letter-searched prime, boat primes float but swim and coat don’t: Further evidence for automatic semantic activation

Abstract

Letter search (LS) on the prime typically eliminates semantic priming (swim-float) and orthographic/ phonological (O/P) priming (coat-float) but not morphological priming (marked-mark). However, LS on the prime does not reduce semantic priming for low-frequency targets (Tse & Neely, 2007). These findings suggest that semantic activation survives LS but decays during LS to a low level that can be detected only with sensitive measures, which are afforded by low-frequency targets and morphologically related primes and targets. In the present research, we show that LS on the prime results in 0 msec of semantic priming (e.g., swim-float) and 11 msec of O/P priming (e.g., coat-float), both of which are statistically null, whereas the LS semantic+O/P priming effect for primes and targets that do not share a morpheme (e.g., boat-float) is a robust 37 msec. Discussion focuses on the automaticity of semantic activation and whether morphological priming is mediated by (1) a morphemic representation that is separate from semantic representations or (2) activation combined from semantics and orthography/phonology.