Semantic priming between words is reduced or eliminated if a low-level task such as letter search is performed on the prime word (the prime task effect), a finding used to question the automaticity of semantic processing of words. This idea is critically examined in 3 experiments with a new design that allows the search target to occur both inside and outside the prime word. The new design prod...

Semantic priming involves a combination of automatic processes like spreading activation (SA) and controlled processes like expectancy and semantic matching. An alternative account for automatic priming has been suggested using attractor neural networks. Such networks offer a more biologically plausible model of real neuronal dynamics but fall short in explaining several important effects such ...

This paper reports an experiment which explores how our semantic representations of individual objects are organized and accessed in memory and how these representations are inter-linked with those of other individuals. A priming experiment was conducted to investigate the relations between singular representations of famous individuals from four categories (person, building, artwork and produc...

To investigate the effects of dopamine on the dynamics of semantic activation, 39 healthy volunteers were randomly assigned to ingest either a placebo (n = 24) or a levodopa (n = 16) capsule. Participants then performed a lexical decision task that implemented a masked priming paradigm. Direct and indirect semantic priming was measured across stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs) of 250, 500 and 1...

Semantic priming occurs when a subject is faster in recognising a target word when it is preceded by a related word compared to an unrelated word. The effect is attributed to automatic or controlled processing mechanisms elicited by short or long interstimulus intervals (ISIs) between primes and targets. We employed event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate blood...

One of the most pervasive findings in studies of schizophrenics with thought disorders is their peculiar pattern of semantic priming, which presumably reflects abnormal associative processes in the semantic system of these patients. Semantic priming is manifested by faster and more accurate recognition of a word-target when preceded by a semantically related prime, relative to an unrelated prim...

Recent event-related potential research has reported a N200 response or a negative deflection peaking around 200 ms following the visual presentation of two-character Chinese words. This N200 shows amplitude enhancement upon immediate repetition and there has been preliminary evidence that it reflects orthographic processing but not semantic processing. The present study tested whether this N20...

Chronometric studies of language and memory processing typically emphasize changes in mean response time (RT) performance across conditions. However, changes in mean performance (or the lack thereof) may reflect distinct patterns at the level of underlying RT distributions. In seven experiments, RT distributional analyses were used to better understand how distributions change across related an...

This paper presents a model of the mental lexicon and its formation, based on the self-organizing neural network. When exposed to raw text, the model clusters words according to their semantic relatedness to form a semantic network 7]. Simulations using artiicial data are described that show how co-occurrence information can be used to create a low-dimensional representation of lexical semantic...

This paper summarizes the results of a large-scale evaluation study of bag-ofwords distributional models on behavioral data from three semantic priming experiments. The tasks at issue are (i) identification of consistent primes based on their semantic relatedness to the target and (ii) correlation of semantic relatedness with latency times. We also provide an evaluation of the impact of specifi...