Norris and colleagues have proposed that priming effects observed in the masked prime same–different task are based solely on pre-lexical orthographic information. This proposal was evaluated by examining translation priming effects from non-cognate translation equivalents using both Spanish–English and Japanese–English bilinguals in the same–different task. Although no priming was observed for...

Although subjects have little or no awareness of masked primes, Bodner and Masson (2001) found that priming of lexical decisions is often enhanced when masked repetition primes occur on a high proportion of trials. We used baseline prime conditions to specify the locus of this repetition proportion (RP) effect. In Experiments 1A and 1B, a .8-RP group showed more priming than did a .2-RP group, ...

Left/right "fixed" responses to arrow targets are influenced by whether a masked arrow prime is congruent or incongruent with the required target response. Left/right "free-choice" responses on trials with ambiguous targets that are mixed among fixed trials are also influenced by masked arrow primes. We show that the magnitude of masked priming of both fixed and free-choice responses is greater...

Measuring response times has been a staple for evaluating masked semantic priming. Its efficacy, however, has been challenged on several grounds — reported effect sizes of these studies are relatively small, and priming effects pertaining to response time measures are difficult to be replicated. Here, we report a complementary method — recording trajectories of a computer cursor. Participants j...

We carried out a masked priming lexical decision experiment to study whether visual letter similarity plays a role during the initial phases of word processing in young readers of Arabic (fifth graders). Arabic is ideally suited to test these effects because most Arabic letters share their basic shape with at least one other letter and differ only in the number/position of diacritical points (e...

The current study investigated the robustness of priming from a masked speech priming method introduced by Kouider and Dupoux 2005 . Psychol. Sci. 16, 617–625 . In this procedure, a compressed spoken prime is embedded in auditory masking stimuli and presented immediately prior to an uncompressed auditory target. The degree to which spoken stimuli could be compressed without significant data los...

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...

In two experiments, the automatic processing of evaluative information was investigated using a masked affective priming paradigm, varying valence (positive vs. negative) and relevance (other-relevant traits vs. possessor-relevant traits; Peeters, 1983) of prime and target stimuli. It was found that under specified conditions, valence-congruency effects were only found if prime and target match...

We describe the results of a study that combines ERP recordings and sandwich priming, a variant of masked priming that provides a brief preview of the target prior to prime presentation (S. J. Lupker & C. J. Davis, 2009). This has been shown to increase the size of masked priming effects seen in behavioral responses. We found the same increase in sensitivity to ERP priming effects in an orthogr...

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...