Role of Prior Knowledge on Naming and Lexical Decisions with Good and Poor Stimulus Information

To what extent does prior knowledge of a superordinate category facilitate recognition of an instance of that category? In Experiment 1, observers named good and poor exemplars of categories with and without prior presentation of the category name. The test words were either printed in a normal upright position, or the words were rotated 180°. Prior priming with the category name shortened naming times, but only when the test stimulus was rotated. The prime facilitated recognition to a greater degree for the good exemplars than for the poor exemplars. To ensure that lexical access was not bypassed in the first experiment, the study was replicated in a lexical decision task. Nonwords were identical to the test words except that they were misspelled by one letter. Identical results were found in the lexical decision task. These experiments and other recent studies make apparent the trade-off between the facilitating effects of prior knowledge and stimulus information in word recognition.