CONCEPTUAL COMBINATIONS AND RELATIONAL CONTEXTS IN FREE ASSOCIATION AND IN PRIMING IN LEXICAL DECISION AND NAMING

Words known to have strong associates of a particular relational type were embedded in lists of other words with relations of the same type or in lists of words with relations of a different type (e.g. chose-fa r in a list of other opposite pairs or in a list of synonym pairs). In free association, the probability of a response consistent with the r elational context was higher than the probability of a response incons istent with the context. In lexical decision and naming, significant p riming was obtained for related pairs of words only when their relatio n was consistent with the relational context of the list in which they were embedded. The priming effects were obtained when the stimulus on set asynchrony between prime and target words was short (250 msec for lexical decision and 300 msec for naming), indicating that the effects were due to automatic retrieval processes. These findings point to th e importance of the particular relations between words in the retrieva l of information from memory, an aspect of processing overlooked by cu rrent memory models.