Abstract
The context in which a word occurs could influence either the actual decoding of the word or a postrecognition judgment of the relatedness of word and context. In this research, we investigated the loci of contextual effects that occur in lexical priming, when prime and target words are related along different dimensions. Both lexical decision and naming tasks were used because previous research had suggested that they are differentially sensitive to postlexical processing. Semantic and associative priming occurred with both tasks. Other facilitative contextual effects, due to syntactic relations between words, backward associations, or changes in the proportion of related items, occurred only with the lexical decision task. The results indicate that only associative and semantic priming facilitate the decoding of a target; the other effects are postlexical. The results are related to the different demands of the naming and lexical decision tasks, and to current models of word recognition.
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This research was supported by Grants A7924 and A8325 from the Natural Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada and Grant EQ-2074 from the Quebec Ministry of Education (FCAC). Waters was supported by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada postdoctoral fellowship. Experiments 1 and 3 formed parts of undergraduate theses by Sanders and Langer. Gail Fornarolo and Sharon Greene ably assisted in running the experiments.
—Steven W. Keele served as Action Editor for this manuscript.
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Seidenberg, M.S., Waters, G.S., Sanders, M. et al. Pre- and postlexical loci of contextual effects on word recognition. Memory & Cognition 12, 315–328 (1984). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03198291
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03198291