Semantic and Associative Priming in the Mental Lexicon

This chapter investigates one of the most studied effect in psycholinguistics: the so-called "semantic priming effect". After a brief survey of the literature, a lexical decision experiment is presented and investigates two types of "semantic priming": (1) purely semantic priming without association, and (2) purely associative priming without semantic similarity. Three prime duration were tested in the reported experiment (100, 250, and 500 msec). The results demonstrate the existence of automatic semantic similarity priming in the absence of normative association (for pairs such as "dolphinWHALE"), and also the existence of automatic associative priming in the absence of semantic similarity (for pairs such as "spider-WEB"). These separate effects of priming (semantic and associative) are interpreted within the framework of the spreadingactivation theory (Collins & Loftus, 1975), the distributed model of semantic memory (Plaut, 1995; Plaut & Booth, 2000) and the Interactive Activation model including semantics (McClelland, 1987; Stolz & Besner, 1996).