Prime-target Pairs Research Articles

Repetition priming in auditory word recognition

Repetition priming, faster response times to a word when it is preceded by an identical rather than an unrelated prime, has been repeatedly obtained using diverse methodologies and stimuli. However Slowiaczek and Hamburger [J. Exp. Psychol. Learn. Mem. Cognit. 18, 1239–1250 (1992)] failed to find repetition priming for auditorily primed, monosyllabic, auditory words. They suggested that strategic processing caused by list context effects was responsible. Repetition priming, however, was not obtained when strategic processing was reduced [M. B. Hamburger and L. M. Slowiaczek, J. Exp. Psychol. Learn. Mem. Cognit. (under review)]. The current experiments further investigate repetition priming in auditory word recognition. Subjects shadowed auditorily presented targets preceded by unrelated, phonologically similar, or identical auditory primes. Phonological similarity [whether prime-target pairs shared one phoneme (low similarity) or three phonemes (high similarity)] and likelihood of strategic processing were manipulated. Results demonstrated that repetition priming can be found for auditorily primed, monosyllabic, auditory words when subjects are not exposed to high similarity, phonologically related prime-target pairs. This effect is greater when strategic processing is reduced. [Work supported by NIH grant NS-29286-03.]

Stimulus Repetition Produces Automatic Facilitation in a Naming Task

Repeated prime-target pairs in a lexical decision task showed improvement across 4 stimulus onset asynchronies for a single subject.

Increased priming interference at a long SOA with brief masked targets.

Abstract This experiment tests a prediction of a model of priming proposed by McLeod and Walley (1989) in which interference is caused by inhibitory processes between nodes in semantic memory. This model predicts that interference normally found in a high cue validity condition at long SOAS will be considerably increased when a brief target is masked. This prediction was confirmed.In a priming task it has typically been found that interference associated with a semantically unrelated prime occurs only when the target follows the prime at a long stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) and subjects pay attention to the prime, using it as a cue to the target (e.g., Neely, 1977). This pattern of priming interference is well accounted for by Posner and Snyder's (1975) two process model of attention.It has sometimes been found, however, that priming interference occurs with short SOA's: McLeod and Walley (1989), for example, found large interference effects with a short SOA in both a high and a low cue validity condition when brief targets were immediately masked, effects not easily explained by the two process model. To explain these effects, we have proposed a model of priming in which nodes corresponding to concepts in semantic memory may be connected by both excitatory and inhibitory links. Inhibitory links may be an essential mechanism of selective attention, filtering out irrelevant activation (Walley & Weiden, 1973), and may also account for priming and other interference effects.When a node in memory is activated, activation tends to spread to semantically related nodes through excitatory links. At the same time, activation of other nodes is inhibited due to inhibitory links. The more strongly a node is activated, the more strongly it will tend to inhibit other nodes. If more than one node is activated, therefore, the more strongly activated node will win out in the competition for response mechanisms because it will inhibit other nodes more strongly than it is itself being inhibited.In a priming task with a short SOA, nodes corresponding to both the prime and the target are activated and compete with each other through these inhibitory processes. Normally, activation of an unrelated prime node does not present serious competition to the target node because, by the time the target is presented, activation of the prime node has already begun to decay. However, when a very brief target is immediately masked, erasing or overwriting the visual image, processing is interrupted before the target node is fully activated, making it susceptible to inhibition generated by the prime node.With a long SOA in a high cue validity condition, if subjects are using the prime as a cue to develop an expectation regarding the target, then the node in memory corresponding to the expected target would be activated. If the target is unrelated, and therefore unexpected, there will be activation of two competing nodes: the node corresponding to the expected target and the node corresponding to the target actually presented. Because these nodes are both strongly activated at the same time, inhibition generated by the expected target node results in the interference effects typically found.We predicted that interference would be considerably increased in this condition if, as in our earlier studies, targets were brief and immediately masked. In this case, our model suggests that activation of the target node would be considerably reduced and it would therefore be affected even more strongly by inhibition generated by the node corresponding to the expected target.In the following experiment, this prediction was tested. The task was a primed lexical decision with an SOA of 800 ms. Cue validity was either high (75% of prime target pairs related), or low (25% of prime target pairs related). Targets were brief, and masked in either block 1 or block 2 of trials. Masking was blocked because in a previous experiment we had found that subjects had extreme difficulty recognizing brief masked targets mixed with brief unmasked targets. …

Emotional influences on semantic priming.

Influences of mood on qualitative aspects of cognitive processing are examined within a semantic priming paradigm. The priming effect reflects the reduction of latency for a lexical decision task when a target word is presented in combination with an associatively related prime word. The effect was higher for subjects in whom positive affect had been induced than for a control group, if prime and target were high-associatively related. There was no effect of mood on priming for low-associatively related prime-target pairs. The results are interpreted in terms of a general facilitating influence of mood on spreading activation independent of the affective quality of the processed material.

Semantic priming of word pronunciation and lexical decision in schizophrenia

Experimental assessments of semantic memory structure and function in schizophrenic subjects can be a useful approach for delineating some of the information processing deficits in schizophrenia. In this study, a pronunciation and a lexical decision semantic priming experiment were conducted with 19 schizophrenic subjects and 20 normal controls. A short stimulus-onset asynchrony (250 msec) and a relatively low proportion of related prime-target pairs were used in order to examine automatic priming and in order to avoid the contribution of attentional, controlled processes. On the pronunciation task, schizophrenic subjects showed a significant priming effect, equal to the priming shown by normal controls. However, on the lexical decision task, schizophrenics, unlike normal controls, did not show a priming effect which is significantly greater than zero, even though the group difference in priming effect (interaction of priming effect by group) was nonsignificant. The lack of priming on the lexical decision task is consistent with the hypothesis that schizophrenic subjects may show abnormalities in the realm of post-lexical, controlled information processing. The equal-to-normal priming for schizophrenic subjects indicates that the basic structure of the semantic network, including associations among related concepts, is intact in schizophrenia, and that spreading activation also occurs normally.

Effects of semantic context and event-related potentials: N400 correlates with inhibition effect

Two experiments investigated the modulation of event-related brain potentials (ERPs) by semantic context. A prime-target pair was visually presented in each trial of a lexical decision task. For word targets, three types of relatedness conditions were employed: (1) Related word condition (e.g., school-teacher); (2) Neutral word condition (e.g., ⊚⊚-number); (3) Unrelated word condition (e.g., hospital-potato). In Experiment 1, the reaction time for unrelated targets was longer than that for neutral targets (inhibition effect) which was longer than that for related targets (facilitation effect). The N400 amplitude in the unrelated targets was larger compared to those in the related and neutral targets, which did not differ. In Experiment 2, where only the facilitation effect was obtained, the N400 amplitude did not differ among conditions.

Perceptual representation in spoken word recognition: Evidence from CVCC and CCVC stimuli

The representation used to recognize spoken words was investigated using natural CVCC and CCVC word and nonword stimuli in a primed lexical decision task. In this task, subjects decided whether the second item in a prime-target pair was a word or nonword, as quickly and accurately as possible. Five prime-target relations were devised: identity (/pats/–/pats/), break cluster (spat/–/pats/), change vowel (/p ts/–/pats/), change both (/st p/–/pats/), and control (/grin/–/pats/). The pattern of mean RTs and accuracy across these five relation types provides insight into issues such as the nature of the representation underlying spoken words (possibilities include the abstract phoneme, position-specific phoneme, triphone, and syllable) and the cohesiveness of consonantal clusters (will a cluster act as a cohesive unit or as separate phonemes?). Furthermore, enough data were collected to partition the RTs into fast, medium, and slow ranges. It was reasoned that the pattern of results in the slow range would reflect a post-lexical representation while the results from the fast range would reflect the prelexical level of representation that is used in recognizing spoken words. [Work supported by NIDCD Grant No. DC00219 to SUNY at Buffalo.]

Weak contextual constraints in text and word priming

The effects of text priming and word priming have often been confounded in the literature. Four lexical decision experiments are reported here that clarify this distinction. In the first two, priming effects are observed for words related to a prior text even though they immediately follow an unrelated word. Two further experiments dismiss the possibility that this effect is attributable to sustained priming, stemming from associatively related words occurring earlier in the text. Overall these findings run counter to predictions from Kintsch's (1988, Psychological Review, 95 , 163–182) construction-integration model and favor the lexical distance model (N. Sharkey, 1989a, in Proceedings, eleventh annual Cognitive Science Society meeting; 1990a, in D. Balota, G. B. Flores d'Arcais, and K. Rayner (Eds.), Comprehension processes in reading. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum) . However, an absence of associative priming for prime target pairs embedded in text rather than scrambled sentences (Experiments 3 and 4) is a difficult finding to align with any current model of word recognition.

Orthographic rimes as functional units of reading in fourth-grade children

Two experiments are described, both using substitution priming to investigate the hypothesis that orthographic rime units serve as functional units of word recognition for fourth-grade children. In Experiment 1, prime-target pairs were presented in blocks of similar prime type. As predicted, substitution priming was observed only when the prime word shared the final trigram (rime unit) with the target word (weed-seed). Words which shared the initial trigram with the target, and either the same (lean-leap) or different (pine-pink) grapheme-phoneme correspondences, were ineffective primes. In Experiment 2, word pairs with differing prime-target relationships were randomly distributed within the stimulus set. No facilitative effects of substitution priming were observed. Taken together, these experiments indicate that children at this level of reading development can use orthographic rime units in word recognition, but mat the use of orthographic rime units is not yet automatised.

Inflectional and Derivational Morphology in the Mental Lexicon: Symmetries and Asymmetries in Repetition Priming

Using a repetition priming paradigm, the interrelations between morphologically related words in the mental lexicon were examined in two experiments. In contrast to most previous studies, in which morphologically complex words occur as primes and stems as targets, derivationally and inflectionally complex forms were fully crossed in prime–target pairs. Experiment 1 showed asymmetries in the pattern of priming effects between different inflectional forms of German adjectives. Such asymmetries are problematic for any theory that assumes that all members of an inflectional paradigm share one entry in the mental lexicon. Experiment 2 contrasted derivational and inflectional variants of the same stems used in Experiment 1. Once again, there were same clear asymmetries in the pattern of priming effects. The implications of these results for models of lexical organization of inflectional and derivational morphology are discussed.

Repetition priming with aspect and agreement morphology in American Sign Language

Two experiments are reported which investigate the organization and recognition of morphologically complex forms in American Sign Language (ASL) using a repetition priming technique. Three major questions were addressed: (1) Is morphological priming a modality-independent process? (2) Do the different properties of agreement and aspect morphology in ASL affect priming strength? (3) Does early language experience influence the pattern of morphological priming? Prime-target pairs (separated by 26-32 items) were presented to deaf subjects for lexical decision. Primes were inflected for either agreement (dual, reciprocal, multiple) or aspect (habitual, continual); targets were always the base form of the verb. Results of Experiment 1 indicated that subjects exposed to ASL in late childhood were not as sensitive to morphological complexity as native signers, but this result was not replicated in Experiment 2. Both experiments showed stronger facilitation with aspect morphology compared to agreement morphology. Repetition priming was not observed for nonsigns. The scope and structure of the morphological rules for ASL aspect and agreement are argued to explain the different patterns of morphological priming.

Semantic processing of unattended parafoveal words

The influence that a context word presented either foveally or parafoveally, may exert on the processing of a subsequent target word was studied in a semantic decision task. Fourteen subjects participated in the experiment. They were presented with word-nonword pairs (prime). One member of the pair (which the subjects had to attend to) appeared centrally, the other parafoveally. The prime was followed by a target at two inter-stimulus intervals (ISI; 200 and 2000 msec). The word stimulus of the pair could be semantically related or unrelated to the target. The subjects' task was to classify the target as animal or not animal by pressing one of two buttons as quickly as possible. When the target word was semantically associated with the foveal (attended) word the reaction times were faster for both ISIs; when it was associated with the parafoveal (unattended) word in the prime pair, there were facilitatory effects only in the short ISI condition. A second experiment was run in order to evaluate the possibility that the obtained results were due to identification of the parafoveal stimulus. The same prime—target pairs of experiment 1 (without the target stimuli) were used. The prime—target pairs were presented to fourteen subjects who were requested to name the foveal (attended) stimulus and subsequently, if possible, the parafoveal (unattended) one. Even in this condition, percentage of identification of the unattended word was only 15%, suggesting that previous findings were not due to identification of unattended stimuli. Results are discussed in relation to Posner and Snyder's (1975) dual coding theory.

Automatic and Effortful Processing of Emotional Intonation After Right or Left Hemisphere Brain Damage

This study assessed the effects of unilateral right (RHD) or left hemisphere brain damage (LHD) on the knowledge and processing of emotional information imparted by vocal intonation. Semantically neutral statements that conveyed a mood through prosody were used as targets in a mood priming task. These targets were preceded by story primes. The events described in the primes were either congruent with the mood conveyed by the intonation of a target phrase, incongruent with target mood, or emotionally neutral. Prime-target pairs were presented in two attention conditions designed to favor either relatively automatic or effortful mental processing. Response time (RT) data were recorded for accurate judgments of target moods. In the automatic condition, there were no qualitative differences between RHD, LHD, or normally aging control subjects. In the effortful condition, RTs for each group were similarly improved by congruent primes (relative to neutral primes), but RHD subjects were disproportionately slower when targets were preceded by incongruent primes. Results indicate that brain-damaged adults retain knowledge of emotional meanings, and use that knowledge to facilitate effective interpretations in some circumstances. Demands for emotional inference revision were not exclusively responsible for RHD adults' poor performance with incongruent primes, as they successfully revised initial predictions in other conditions. Rather, these subjects' difficulties arose when increased processing demands converged with decreased availability of mental resources. These findings are integrated with those from a related study of lexical metaphor, and are interpreted within a cognitive resource framework.

Informational constraints on pre-lexical priming

Abstract A popular explanation of automatic semantic priming attributes those effects to the spreading of activation across a meaning-based network in lexical memory. A number of conflicting claims have been advanced regarding the kinds of information captured in that pre-lexical network. Lexical decision and naming experiments are reported which indicate (1) that automatic priming is supported equally well by a very broad range of relations, (2) that the quality of relation for individual prime-target pairs, as reflected in such measures as traditional associative strength, has no impact on the amount of priming produced, (3) that asymmetries between lexical decision and naming in the amount of priming they generate under stringent conditions of automaticity require the postulation of an extra-lexical source of automatic priming, and (4) the residual priming left for the putative lexical network to explain is at most a few milliseconds. Taken together, these findings suggest that explanations of automatic priming as a product of pre-lexical spreading activation are at best highly exaggerated and perhaps entirely incorrect. An alternative account appealing to retrospective but automatic semantic integration processes is discussed.

Masked morphological priming in visual word recognition

Two experiments are reported that examine the effects of morphological overlap between prime and target in the masked priming paradigm. Experiment 1 demonstrated that the prior presentation of a higher frequency morphologically related word facilitates target processing. This facilitation obtained only to prefixed and not to suffixed targets and was independent of whether the prime was a stem or another prefixed form. In Experiment 2 morphological priming was estimated using both an unrelated and an orthographically related baseline. Approximately equivalent facilitation was observed for prefixed and suffixed primetarget pairs when measured against the orthographic control. The results suggest that the effects observed in masked morphological priming reflect the combination of both facilitatory and inhibitory mechanisms.

What Makes Signs Related?

In a previous study (Hanson & Feldman 1989) we found significant facilitation, by repetition among prime-target pairs, of signs that share a base morpheme in ASL, and interpreted these results as evidence that skilled signers apprehend the constituent (morphemic) structure of signs. However, morphemically related signs share formal (i.e. physical) and semantic (i.e. associated by meaning) features as well as base morphemes. Therefore, alternative explanations could not be confidently eliminated. In the present study we tested whether the earlier results could have been due to repetition of (only) physical or (only) associative properties, rather than morphological similarities, which combine both. Using a sign decision task, in which signers made a decision about the number of hands required to form a particular sign in ASL, we found no evidence to suggest an influence of either physical or associative priming under the same experimental conditions that produced facilitation among morphological relatives. This outcome supports our earlier claim that deaf signers organize their ASL lexicons according to the morphological relationships expressed in ASL.

Repetition blindness depends on perceptual capture and token individuation failure.

A visual prime succeeded by a brief target produces a paradox. Namely, target repetition yields poorer identification accuracy and shorter duration judgments than unrelated prime-target pairs. Experiment 1 manipulated stimulus onset asynchrony to learn when repetition blindness is maximized. Experiments 2 and 3 manipulated expectancy of repetitions through changes in the proportion of repeated trials and instructions, respectively. Results indicate that repetition blindness is influenced by subject strategies and that the change is not mediated by response bias. Experiment 4 showed that increasing the spatial distance between prime and target reduced but did not eliminate repetition blindness. The current data support joint explanation of repetition blindness in terms of perceptual capture (prime-target fusion) and token individuation failure (problems in encoding episodic reoccurrences of an event).

Knowledge and Strategies for Processing Lexical Metaphor after Right or Left Hemisphere Brain Damage

This study was designed to assess how unilateral right hemisphere brain damage (RHD) affects the knowledge and processing of metaphoric aspects of word meaning. Ambiguous adjectives that could convey either a metaphoric or a literal meaning were used as target words in auditory lexical decision tasks. Targets were preceded by primes that were valid (related to the target's metaphoric or literal meaning), neutral, or unrelated. Prime-target pairs were presented in two attention conditions, designed to favor either relatively automatic or relatively effortful mental processing, and reaction time data were gathered. RHD stroke patients performed similarly to left-brain-damaged and normal control subjects in the automatic condition, and when provided with specific processing strategies, indicating that they retained some knowledge of metaphoric word meanings. When left to glean strategies for themselves, however, both brain-damaged groups had difficulty. These results and others from the RHD literature are discussed in terms of attentional resource capacity and attentional allocation models.

Priming word recognition with orthographic neighbors: Effects of relative prime-target frequency.

Four lexical decision experiments were performed with an orthographic priming paradigm in which test words were preceded by orthographically related or unrelated prime words. When prime words were presented for 350 ms without a mask, it was observed that primes that are lower frequency orthographic neighbors of the target interfered with target processing relative to an unrelated condition. When primes were higher frequency neighbors of the target, no interference or facilitation was observed. On the other hand, with briefly presented masked primes, interference was observed with higher frequency prime words. Finally, facilitatory effects in masked repetition priming were obtained with both high- and low-frequency prime-target pairs. The results are interpreted in terms of activation and selection processes operating in visual word recognition.

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

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.