Shared neighborhood effects in masked orthographic priming

Several studies have found effects of orthographically related masked nonwo rd primes on lexical decisions to target words. These effects have been exp lained by the neighborhood characteristics of the target word (Forster, 198 7), but the neighborhood characteristics of the prime in combination with t he target are also found to be important (Hinton, Liversedge, & Underwood, 1998). In this study, we present a new account of masked form-priming effec ts based on the shared neighborhood of prime and target. Shared neighbors a re words that are activated by both prime and target. According to the inte ractive activation model (McClelland & Rumelhart, 1981), shared neighborhoo d determines the size of priming effects. This prediction was tested and co nfirmed in a masked priming experiment that manipulated the shared neighbor hood density of complete primes.