REPETITION PRIMING AND EXPERIMENTAL CONTEXT EFFECTS

The repetition priming effect has been taken as evidence that lexical entries are automatically activated in memory. However, contextual cue s in an experiment may influence repetition priming, suggesting that t his priming may not be the result of automatic processes. Five experim ents used a primed shadowing task to explore the role of phonological context on repetition priming. In the first four experiments, high- an d low-expectancy conditions were tested. Between experiments, the degr ee of phonological relatedness (high or low phonological similarity), percentage of related trials that were repetition trials (ID ratio), a nd modality of stimulus presentation (auditory or visual) were manipul ated. Results indicate that repetition priming in auditory word recogn ition is eliminated by a low ID ratio. The fact that an external varia ble such as the ID ratio influences repetition priming suggests that r epetition priming may be the product of processes extraneous to the au tomatic activation of lexical entries.