Sentence production relies on the activation of semantic information (e.g., noun animacy) and syntactic frames that specify an order for grammatical functions (e.g., subject before object). However, it is unclear whether these semantic and syntactic processes interact and if this might change over development. We thus examined the extent to which animacy-semantic role mappings in dative prime s...

Priming is a nonconscious form of human memory, which is concerned with perceptual identification of words and objects and which has only recently been recognized as separate from other forms of memory or memory systems. It is currently under intense experimental scrutiny. Evidence is converging for the proposition that priming is an expression of a perceptual representation system that operate...

Two experiments explored the effects of stimulus degradation on behavioral and event-related potential (ERP) measures of semantic priming. The primary goal was to help elucidate the psychological processes that underlie the N400 component. In both experiments, subjects made speeded lexical decisions to words and pseudowords preceded by either semantically related or unrelated prime words. In on...

There is evidence that the explicit lexical-semantic processing deficits which characterize aphasia may be observed in the absence of implicit semantic impairment. The aim of this article was to critically review the international literature on lexical-semantic processing in aphasia, as tested through the semantic priming paradigm. Specifically, this review focused on aphasia and lexical-semant...

The aim of this study is to examine the neural substrates involved in semantic priming using a combined event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and event-related potentials (ERP) study. Twelve subjects were instructed to judge whether the presented target word was a real word or a nonword. Under the related condition, target words were preceded by a semantically related prime...

Data from masked priming experiments have been used to support a traditional view of the mental lexicon where morphemes are stored discretely and complex words are decomposed in processing. In masked priming, visual primes are presented briefly and masked so to that subjects cannot consciously process them. This paradigm is generally considered insensitive to semantic effects. Thus, results sho...