Repetition and form priming interact with neighborhood density at a brief stimulus onset asynchrony

The relationships between repetition- and form-priming effects and neighbor hood density were analyzed in two masked priming experiments with the lexic al decision task. Given that form-priming effects appear to be influenced b y a word's orthographic neighborhood, it is theoretically important to find out whether repetition priming also differs as a function of the word's or thographic neighborhood. Within an activation framework, repetition- and fo rm-priming effects are just quantitatively different phenomena, whereas the two effects are qualitatively different in a serial-ordered model of lexic al access (the entry-opening model). The results show that repetition- and form-priming effects were stronger for hermit words than for words with man y neighbors. These results pose some problems for both activation and seria l-ordered models. The implications of these results for determining how nei ghbors affect the identification of a word are discussed.