READING GLASSES WILL PRIME VISION, BUT READING A PAIR OF GLASSES WILLNOT

In a lexical decision task with two primes and a target, the target wa s preceded 300 msec by the second prime (P2) which in turn was precede d by a brief forward and backward masked first prime (Pi). When P1 and P2 were unrelated, reaction times were faster when the target was rel ated to P2 (e.g., wave SALT...pepper) than when the target was unrelat ed to P2 (and P1-e.g., wave LOAN...pepper). However, this semantic pri ming effect was reduced to statistically nonsignificant levels when P1 and P2 were repetitions of the same word. That is, priming did not oc cur for salt SALT...pepper relative to loan LOAN...pepper. This reduct ion in priming was observed whether P2 and the target were strongly or weakly related. These findings raise problems for current accounts of semantic priming.