Verb generation priming involves conceptual implicit memory

Brain activation patterns differ and generation latencies are reduced when generating verbs to repeated nouns (Raichle et al., 1994). Amnesic particip ants show normal magnitude of priming (Seger et al., 1997). Despite its imp ortance in neuropsychology, verb generation priming is not well characteriz ed psychologically. Six behavioral studies found that verb generation primi ng was specific to the verb rather than to the noun or the noun-verb pair, was equivalent after overt or covert generation and after readings verbs or generating verbs, was affected by levels of processing, and transferred co mpletely across languages in bilinguals. These results indicate that verb g eneration priming involves priming of particular responses and happens at a conceptual level. These findings provide new insights about the significan ce of brain imaging and neuropsychological studies involving verb generatio n priming. (C) 1999 Academic Press.