Mediated priming refers to the faster word recognition of a target (e.g., milk) following presentation of a prime (e.g., pasture) that is related indirectly via a connecting "mediator" (e.g., cow). Association strength may be an important factor in whether mediated priming occurs prospectively (with target activation prior to its presentation) or…

This experiment used the masked priming lexical decision task to address previous contradictory evidence about the relative strength of priming for (i) transparent pairs (e.g., "worker" "WORK") which are morphologically and semantically related; (ii) opaque pairs (e.g., "corner" "CORN") which appear to be morphological relatives but are not…

This study investigated whether speakers strategically decide where to interrupt their speech once they need to stop. We conducted four naming experiments in which pictures of colored shapes occasionally changed in color or shape. Participants then merely had to stop (Experiment 1); or they had to stop and resume speech (Experiments 2-4). They…

When asked to list semantic features for concrete concepts, participants list many features for some concepts and few for others. Concepts with many semantic features are processed faster in lexical and semantic decision tasks [Pexman, P. M., Lupker, S. J., & Hino, Y. (2002). "The impact of feedback semantics in visual word recognition:…

Morpheme frequency effects for derived words (e.g. an influence of the frequency of the base "dark" on responses to "darkness") have been interpreted as evidence of morphemic representation. However, it has been suggested that most derived words would not show these effects if family size (a type frequency count claimed to reflect semantic…

In semantic categorization, masked primes that are category-congruent with the target (e.g., "Planets: mars-VENUS") facilitate responses relative to category-incongruent primes (e.g., "tree-VENUS"). The present study investigated why this category congruence effect is more consistently found with narrow categories (e.g., "Numbers larger/smaller…

University students participated in five experiments concerning the effects of unmasked, orthographically similar, primes on visual word recognition in the lexical decision task (LDT) and naming tasks. The modal prime-target stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) was 350 ms. When primes were words that were orthographic neighbors of the targets, and…

In this study, we investigate the relevance of inflectional paradigms and inflectional classes for lexical processing. We provide an information-theoretical measure of the divergence in the frequency distributions of two of the paradigms to which a word simultaneously belongs: the paradigm of the stem and the more general paradigm of the nominal…

According to parallel distributed processing (PDP) models of visual word recognition, the speed of semantic coding is modulated by the nature of the orthographic-to-semantic mappings. Consistent with this idea, an ambiguity disadvantage and a relatedness-of-meaning (ROM) advantage have been reported in some word recognition tasks in which semantic…