ASSOCIATIVE PRIMING IN WORD-FRAGMENT COMPLETION - A DISSOCIATION BETWEEN EXPLICIT AND IMPLICIT RETRIEVAL-PROCESSES

Three experiments investigated associative priming in word fragment co mpletion. In associative priming, the study word that acts as a prime is semantically related in some way to the response word that the subj ect must produce or respond to at test. For example, a prime might be semantically related to the solution to its paired word fragment (e.g. study ''VANILLA'', solve fragment ''-H-C-A-E'' at test, solution is ' 'CHOCOLATE''). Associative priming therefore differs from both repetit ion and conceptual priming, in which the studied primes are themselves the words that must be produced or responded to at test. In Experimen t 1, associative primes were found to influence word fragment completi on performance on an explicit test, but not on an implicit test. Exper iment 2 demonstrated that the effects of associative primes on explici tly instructed fragment completion cannot be attributed to the specifi c information about cue-prime relationships that is included in the ex plicit instructions. Experiment 3 demonstrated that a manipulation of modality, a variable known to disrupt implicit retrieval processes, di srupts repetition priming on an explicit test, but not associative pri ming. The results of these three experiments suggest that whereas repe tition primes are retrieved from memory by both explicit and implicit retrieval processes, associative primes are retrieved by only explicit processes. These data suggest that implicit retrieval processes are c ue-dependent processes which automatically retrieve memory information that provides a good match to retrieval cues. Explicit retrieval proc esses are cue-independent, functioning as an intentional retrieval set to access particular categories or types of memory information.