Abstract
The effects of semantic priming with the yes/no and the go/no-go lexical decision task. Two lexical decision experiments were conducted to examine the effects of semantic, non-associative priming (e.g., garden-ORCHARD) with the single-presentation technique. In Experiment 1, we used the standard yes/no task, whereas in Experiment 2 we used a go/no-go task (in this task, participants were instructed to respond as quickly as they can when a word was presented, and refrain from responding if a nonword was presented). The motivation for the manipulation of task was that Neely (1991) suggested that the magnitude of the effect of semantic priming could be greater with the go/no-go task than with the yes/no task. The results showed a significant semantic priming effect in the two experiments, although the semantic priming effect in the yes/no task occurred in the error data and in the tail of the response time distribution rather than in the mean response time. The implications of these results are discussed.
