The N400 ERP is an electrophysiological index of semantic processing. Its amplitude varies with the semantic category of words, their concreteness, or whether their meaning matches that of a preceding context. The results of a number of studies suggest that these effects could be markedly reduced or suppressed for stimuli that are repeated. Nevertheless, we have recently shown that significant ...

We present two masked priming lexical decision experiments in which we examined whether a nonword prime word would activate associative/semantic information from its corresponding addition neighbor (e.g., lght-dark via the addition neighbor light), producing associative/semantic priming. The rationale was the following: If a nonword prime with a missing letter produced a semantic/associative pr...

Recently, priming effects of unconscious stimuli that were never presented as targets have been taken as evidence for the processing of the stimuli's semantic categories. The present study explored the necessary conditions for a transfer of priming to novel primes. Stimuli were digits and letters which were presented in various viewer-related orientations (upright, horizontal, inverted). The tr...

Stimulus quality and word frequency produce additive effects in lexical decision performance, whereas the semantic priming effect interacts with both stimulus quality and word frequency effects. This pattern places important constraints on models of visual word recognition. In Experiment 1, all three variables were investigated within a single speeded pronunciation study. The results indicated ...

Semantic priming by visually masked, unidentifiable ("subliminal") words occurs robustly when the words appearing as masked primes have been classified earlier in practice as visible targets. It has been argued (Damian, 2001) that practice enables robust subliminal priming by automatizing learned associations between words and the specific motor responses used to classify them. Two experiments ...

This research aims to study how semantic priming words can influence behavioral measures (RTs, accuracy), to develop an experimental paradigm to differentiate visual neglect and hemianopia. 69 experimental subjects were involved in four experiments. In each experiment target words were preceded by word primes semantically related, neutral or unrelated to the target. The four experiments differe...

The present study investigated whether lexical access is affected by a regular phonological variation in connected speech: voice assimilation in French. Two associative priming experiments were conducted to determine whether strongly assimilated, potentially ambiguous word forms activate the conceptual representation of the underlying word. Would the ambiguous word form [sud] (either assimilate...

Emotion and cognition are dynamically coupled to bodily arousal: the induction of anger, even unconsciously, can reprioritise neural and physiological resources toward action states that bias cognitive processes. Here we examine behavioural, neural and bodily effects of covert anger processing and its influence on cognition, indexed by lexical decision-making. While recording beat-to-beat blood...