Primed Lexical Decision: Combined Effects of the Proportion of Related Prime-Target Pairs and the Stimulus-Onset Asynchrony of Prime and Target

Abstract

Lexical decisions to word targets preceded by associatively related word primes are generally faster than those to words following neutral primes, whereas, under certain circumstances, lexical decisions to words preceded by unassociated word primes are slower than those to words following neutral primes. An experiment is reported that investigates the influence of the proportion of related prime-target pairs in the set of materials and of the stimulus-onset asynchrony (SOA) of prime and target on these associative priming effects. Four levels of proportion and three levels of SOA are systematically varied. Both variables are found to affect the size of the associative priming effects. Furthermore, the data suggest interdependence between them. The magnitude of priming only varies with SOA if the proportion of related pairs is relatively large. In contrast, the amount of priming varies with proportion under all SOA conditions. The data are interpreted primarily in terms of two contextual processes, viz., “prime-induced attentional processing” and “post-lexical coherence checking”.