Ms. Weldon, THE TIME-COURSE OF PERCEPTUAL AND CONCEPTUAL CONTRIBUTIONS TO WORD-FRAGMENT COMPLETION PRIMING, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition, 19(5), 1993, pp. 1010-1023
Two experiments examined the time course of the availability of percep
tual and conceptual information in priming on the word fragment comple
tion test. Subjects encoded primes as either visual words, auditory wo
rds, or pictures. In Experiment 1, word fragments were exposed for eit
her 500 ms, 1 s, 5 s, or 12 s. Only the visual words produced priming
at the 500-ms and 1-s exposure times. In Experiment 2, subjects were a
llowed up to 20 s to solve each fragment; response latencies were reco
rded and cumulative response curves were generated. Visually primed fr
agments were solved at a faster rate than either auditorily or pictori
ally primed fragments. The results suggest that although conceptual pr
ocessing can contribute to word fragment priming, perceptual processes
are recruited earlier and at a faster rate.