Semantic and associative priming in picture naming

We report four picture-naming experiments in which the pictures were preced ed by visually presented word primes. The primes could either be semantical ly related to the picture (e.g., "boat" - TRAIN: co-ordinate pairs) or asso ciatively related (e.g., "nest" - BIRD: associated pairs). Performance unde r these conditions was always compared to performance under unrelated condi tions (e.g.,"flower" - CAT). In order to distinguish clearly the first two kinds of prime, we chose our materials so that (a) the words in the co-ordi nate pairs were not verbally associated, and (b) the associate pairs were n ot co-ordinates. Results show that the two related conditions behaved in di fferent ways depending on the stimulus-onset asynchrony (SOA) separating wo rd and picture appearance, but not on how long the primes were presented. When presented with a brief SOA (114 ms, Experiment 1), the co-ordinate pri mes produced an interference effect, but the associated primes did not diff er significantly from the unrelated primes. Conversely, with a longer SOA ( 234 ms, Experiment 2) the co-ordinate primes produced no effect, whereas a significant facilitation effect was observed for associated primes, indepen dent of the duration of presentation of the primes. This difference is inte rpreted in the context of current models of speech production as an argumen t for the existence, at an automatic processing level, of two distinguishab le kinds of meaning relatedness.