In alphabetic languages, prior exposure to a target word's orthographic neighbour influences word recognition in masked priming experiments and the process of word identification that occurs during normal reading. We investigated whether similar neighbour priming effects are observed in Chinese in 4 masked priming experiments (employing a forward mask and 33-ms, 50-ms, and 67-ms prime durations...

When people speak, they have to choose a syntactic structure for their utterances. Research shows that this choice is not made independently for each utterance, and that it is influenced by properties of recent utterances (Bock, 1986). But the learning mechanisms responsible for this influence, and its duration are not completely clear. Pickering and Branigan (1998) suggest that structural repe...

G. Lukatela and M. T. Turvey (1994a) showed that at a 57-ms prime-presentation duration, the naming of a visually presented target word (frog) is primed not only by an associate word (toad) but also by a homophone (towed) and a pseudohomophone (tode) of the associate. At a 250-ms prime presentation, priming with the homophone was no longer observed. In Experiment 1, the authors replicated these...

Studies on syntactic priming strongly suggest that bilinguals can store a single integrated representation of constructions that are similar in both languages (e.g., Spanish and English passives; R. J. Hartsuiker, M. J. Pickering, & E. Veltkamp, 2004). However, they may store 2 separate representations of constructions that involve different word orders (e.g., German and English passives; H. Lo...

It is an ongoing matter of debate, what the nature of syntactic priming effects, and hence, the nature of grammatical information in language processing is. Two specific issues are the focus of the current examination: firstly, the possible relevance of semantic information, and secondly, the role of different stages in grammatical encoding (as proposed by Levelt, 1989). The results of two Germ...

Previous masked phonological priming studies with bilinguals whose languages are written in the same script (e.g., Dutch-French bilinguals) strongly suggest that phonological representations for the two languages are integrated, based on the fact that phonological activation created by reading a word in one language facilitates word identification in the other language. The present research exa...

In order to evaluate the effects of priming materials and duration of priming on the seed physiological enhancement and biochemical traits of germination in pumpkin seeds a factorial experiment was conducted based on a completely randomized design with three replications at the University of Mohaghegh Ardabili. Treatments were priming with water, NaCl (3%), gibberellic acid (20 mg L-1), and asc...

Most bilinguals understand their second language more slowly than their first. This behavioral asymmetry may arise from the perceptual, phonological, lexicosemantic, or strategic components of bilingual word processing. However, little is known about the neural source of such language dominance and how it is regulated in the bilingual brain. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we found...

Given that context affects olfaction and the elderly exhibit olfactory deficits, the current study tested whether a subtle change in internal context, evoked by priming the elderly stereotype, would affect performance in a variety of olfactory tasks including odor sensitivity, discrimination, and identification (Experiment 1), as well as perceived odor intensity, pleasantness and familiarity, a...