BACKGROUND Increased semantic priming is an influential theory of thought disorder in schizophrenia. However, studies to date have had conflicting findings. AIMS To investigate semantic memory in patients with schizophrenia with and without thought disorder. METHOD Data were pooled from 36 studies comparing patients with schizophrenia and normal controls in semantic priming tasks. Data from...

A key problem for models of dialogue is to explain how semantic co-ordination is achieved. The collaborative model highlights pair-specfic co-ordination processes. The interactive alignment model emphasises priming processes. We report a ‘Maze-task’ experiment that investigates the effects of: a) apparent origin of an utterance (primary vs. peripheral participants) and b) prior exposure (primin...

Crossmodal semantic priming is often considered to be a valid technique for measuring the activation of multiple word candidates, particularly if used with auditory prime words cut off before their offset. In previous studies, the technique has been used to show that the activation of multiple candidates is modulated by preceding context. However, the technique has also failed to yield consiste...

Abrams and Grinspan (2007) provide some of the best evidence so far for the existence of unconscious perception. Indeed, they show that priming is still reliable even when partial awareness is impossible, that is when subjects cannot be conscious even of fragments of the prime. This demonstration adds to the growing body of work that provides evidence for the genuine existence of subliminal inf...

The present study investigated whether semantic negative priming from single prime words depends on the availability of cognitive control resources. Participants with high vs. low working memory capacity (as assessed by their performance in complex span and attentional control tasks) were instructed to either attend to or ignore a briefly presented single prime word that was followed by either ...

Three experiments examined the effects of temporal attention and aging on masked repetition and categorical priming for numbers and words. Participants' temporal attention was manipulated by varying the stimulus onset asynchrony (i.e., constant or variable SOA). In Experiment 1, participants performed a parity judgment task and a lexical decision task in which categorical priming and repetition...

Semantic processing of sequences of words requires the cognitive system to keep several word meanings simultaneously activated in working memory with limited capacity. The real- time updating of the sequence of word meanings relies on dynamic changes in the associates to the words that are activated. Protocols involving two sequential primes report a semantic priming shift from larger priming o...

The study presented in this paper aimed to investigate the pattern of semantic priming effects, under masked and unmasked conditions, in the lexical decision task, manipulating type of semantic relation and associative strength. Three different kinds of word relations were examined in two experiments: only-semantically related words [e.g., codo (elbow)-rodilla (knee)] and semantic/associative r...

Semantic priming effects are usually obtained only if the prime is presented shortly before the target stimulus. Recent evidence obtained with the so-called false memory paradigm suggests, however, that in both explicit and implicit memory tasks semantic relations between words can result in long-lasting effects when multiple 'primes' are presented. The aim of the present study was to investiga...