Associative and semantic priming effects occur at very short stimulus-onset asynchronies in lexical decision and naming

Prior research has found significant associative/semantic priming effects at very short stimulus-onset asynchronies (SOAs) in experimental tasks such as lexical decision, but not in naming tasks (however, see Lukatela and Turvey, 1994). In this paper, the time course of associative priming effects was analyzed at several very short SOAs (33, 50, and 67 ms), using the masked priming paradigm (Forster and Davis, 1984), both in lexical decision (Experiment 1) and naming (Experiment 2). The results show small—but significant—associative priming effects in both tasks. Additionally, using the masked priming procedure at the 67 ms SOA, Experiments 3 and 4, shows facilitatory priming effects for both associatively and semantically (unassociative) related pairs in lexical decision and naming tasks. That is, automatic priming can be semantic. Taken together, our data appear to support interactive models of word recognition in which semantic activation may influence the early stages of word processing. © 1997 Elsevier Science B.V.