ASSOCIATIVE AND SEMANTIC PRIMING EFFECTS OCCUR AT VERY SHORT STIMULUS-ONSET ASYNCHRONIES IN LEXICAL DECISION AND NAMING

Prior research has found significant associative/semantic priming effe cts at very short stimulus-onset asynchronies (SOAs) in experimental t asks such as lexical decision, but not in naming tasks (however, see L ukatela and Turvey, 1994). In this paper, the time course of associati ve priming effects was analyzed at several very short SOAs (33, 50, an d 67 ms), using the masked priming paradigm (Forster and Davis, 1984), both in lexical decision (Experiment 1) and naming (Experiment 2). Th e results show small-but significant-associative priming effects in bo th tasks. Additionally, using the masked priming procedure at the 67 m s SOA, Experiments 3 and 4, shows facilitatory priming effects for bot h associatively and semantically (unassociative) related pairs in lexi cal decision and naming tasks. That is, automatic priming can be seman tic. Taken together, our data appear to support interactive models of word recognition in which semantic activation may influence the early stages of word processing. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science B.V.