FREQUENCY AND PRIME DURATION EFFECTS ON REPETITION PRIMING AND ORTHOGRAPHIC PRIMING WITH WORDS AND PSEUDOWORDS

The present experiment studied how repetition priming effects and orth ographic priming effects vary as a function of prime/target frequency and prime duration. In a lexical decision task, word targets were prec eded either by an identical word, a different word, or an orthographic ally related pseudoword, and pseudoword targets were preceded by an id entical pseudoword, a different pseudoword, or an orthographically rel ated word. Primes were masked for one group of subjects but not for th e other. The decrease in prime duration had no effect on repetition pr iming for high-frequency words, considerably reduced repetition primin g for low-frequency words, and eliminated repetition priming for pseud owords. Non-masked pseudoword primes had an inhibitory effect on high- frequency, orthographically similar word targets and a facilitatory ef fect on low-frequency, orthographically similar word targets. In contr ast, only facilitatory effects were obtained with masked pseudoword pr imes. Finally, with pseudoword targets, a facilitatory orthographic pr iming effect was observed with non-masked high-frequency word primes b ut not with non-masked low-frequency word primes or with masked primes . Possible interpretations of these results are discussed.