The present study disentangles 2 sources of the congruence sequence effect with masked primes: congruence and response time of the previous trial (reaction time [RT] carry-over). Using arrows as primes and targets and a metacontrast masking procedure we found congruence as well as congruence sequence effects. In addition, congruence sequence…

The present research examined whether lexical (whole word) or more rule-based (morphological constituent) processes can be locally biased by experimental list context in past tense verb inflection. In Experiment 1, younger and older adults completed a past tense inflection task in which list context was manipulated across blocks containing regular…

Three experiments examined the role of phonology in the activation of word meanings in Grade 5 students. In Experiment 1, homophone and spelling control errors were embedded in a story context and participants performed a proofreading task as they read for meaning. For both good and poor readers, more homophone errors went undetected than spelling…

The present study aims to reveal some facts concerning first language (L[subscript 1]) and second language (L[subscript 2]) spoken-word processing in unbalanced proficient bilinguals using behavioral measures. The intention here is to examine the effects of auditory repetition word priming and semantic priming in first and second languages of…

While natural speech does not possess the same degree of temporal regularity found in music, there is recent evidence to suggest that temporal regularity enhances speech processing. The aim of this experiment was to examine whether speech processing would be enhanced by the prior presentation of a rhythmical prime. We recorded electrophysiological…

Additive and interactive effects of word frequency, stimulus quality, and semantic priming have been used to test theoretical claims about the cognitive architecture of word-reading processes. Additive effects among these factors have been taken as evidence for discrete-stage models of word reading. We present evidence from linear mixed-model…

Unconscious visual stimuli can be processed by human observers and modulate their behavior. This has been shown for masked prime stimuli that influence motor responses to subsequent target stimuli. Beyond this, masked stimuli can also affect participants' behavior when they are free to choose one of two response alternatives. This finding…

Because many words of a language have more than one meaning, readers regularly need to disambiguate words during sentence comprehension. Using priming, eye-tracking, and event-related brain potentials, this thesis tested whether readers differently disambiguate words with semantically related meanings like "wire" and "cone,"…

Individuals' relative awareness of thematic and taxonomic relations is influenced by factors such as language and background knowledge. Relatively weak in Korean language skills and also having relatively limited social opportunities, Korean deaf adolescents might be different from hearing adolescents in how they make decisions in taxonomically…

Priming studies have demonstrated that an object's intrinsic and extrinsic qualities (size, orientation) influence subsequent motor behavior thus suggesting that these object qualities "afford" actions that are congruent with the prime. We present four experiments that aim to evaluate the relative effect of conceptual and physical object qualities…

Three experiments investigated the effects of test-induced priming (TIP) on false recognition in the Deese/Roediger-McDermott procedure (Deese, 1959; Roediger & McDermott, 1995). In Experiment 1, TIP significantly increased false recognition for participants who made old/new decisions at test but not for participants who made remember/know…

With attention and eye-movements humans orient to targets of interest. This orienting occurs faster when the same target repeats: priming of pop-out (PoP). While reaction times (RTs) can be important, PoP's real function could be to steer "where" to orient, a possibility underexposed in many current paradigms, as these predesignate a target to…

The Simon effect is mostly explained in terms of dual-route models, which imply unidirectional activation processes from stimulus features to response features. However, there is also evidence that these preactivated response features themselves prime corresponding stimulus features. From this perspective, the Simon effect should only occur…

The authors examined priming within the test sequence in 3 recognition memory experiments. A probe primed its successor whenever both probes shared a feature with the same studied item ("interjacent priming"), indicating that the study item like the probe is central to the decision. Interjacent priming occurred even when the 2 probes did…

This study investigated feature- and dimension-based intertrial effects in visual search for a pop-out target. The 2 prominent theories explaining intertrial effects, priming of pop-out and dimension weighting, both assume that repeating the target from the previous trial facilitates attention shifts to the target, whereas changing the target…