Abstract
Associative and semantic priming effects at a very brief stimulus-onset asynchrony. This study analyzes the effect of prime-target relationships (semantic vs associative) in automatic priming using a lexical decision task. Three types of semantic relation were used: associated-only (onion-TEARS), similar-only (arm-NOSE), and associated+similar (doctor-NURSE). The stimulus-onset asynchrony (SOA) was set at 67 ms to minimize subjects' strategic process. Under these circunstances, de Groot (1990) proposed that only associated pairs should show facilitative effect (via spreading activation). In this study, only associated pairs (both associated-only and associated+similar) showed reliable priming effects, but not the similar-only condition. This results are interpreted in the context of semantic priming models.
