Semantic Priming

Semantic priming has been a focus of research in the cognitive sciences for more than thirty years and is commonly used as a tool for investigating other aspects of perception and cognition, such as word recognition, language comprehension, and knowledge representations. Semantic Priming: Perspectives from Memory and Word Recognition examines empirical and theoretical advancements in the understanding of semantic priming, providing a succinct, in-depth review of this important phenomenon, framed in terms of models of memory and models of word recognition. The first section examines models of semantic priming, including spreading activation models, the verification model, compound-cue models, distributed network models, and multistage activation models (e.g. interactive-activation model). The second section examines issues and findings that have played an especially important role in testing models of priming and includes chapters on the following topics: methodological issues (e.g. counterbalancing of materials, choice of priming baselines); automatic vs. strategic priming; associative vs. “pure” semantic priming; mediated priming; long-term semantic priming; backward priming; unconscious priming; the prime-task effect; list context effects; effects of word frequency, stimulus quality, and stimulus repetition; and the cognitive neuroscience of semantic priming. The book closes with a summary and a discussion of promising new research directions. The volume will be of interest to a wide range of researchers and students in the cognitive sciences and neurosciences.

Semantic priming - the improvement in speed or accuracy to respond to a word when it is preceded by a semantically related word - is addressed in this volume, which provides a succinct and in-depth overview of this important phenomenon.

Healy provides an overview of basic areas of perception, learning, memory, motivation and emotion. Chapters cover other cognitive processes and special topics such as attention, decision-making, information processing, problem solving and psycholinguistics.

Using Priming Methods in Second Language Research is an accessible introduction to the use of auditory, semantic, and syntactic priming methods for second language (L2) processing and acquisition research. It provides a guide for the use, design, and implementation of priming tasks and an overview of how to analyze and report priming research. Key principles about auditory, semantic, and syntactic priming are introduced, and issues for L2 researchers to consider when designing priming studies are pointed out. Empirical studies that have adopted priming methods are highlighted to illustrate the application of experimental techniques from psychology to L2 processing and acquisition research. Each chapter concludes with follow-up questions and activities that provide additional reinforcement of the chapter content, while the final chapter includes data sets that can be used to practice the statistical tests commonly used with priming data.

This collection of 33 papers represents the most current thinking and research on the study of cognitive processing in bilingual individuals. The contributors include well-known figures in the field and promising new scholars, representing four continents and work in dozens of languages. Instead of the social, political, or educational implications of bilingualism, the focus is on how bilingual people (mostly adults) think and process language.

This book showcases the advantages of masked priming as an alternative to more standard methods of studying language.

How incidentally activated social representations affect subsequent thoughts and behaviors has long interested social psychologists. Recently, such priming effects have provoked debate and skepticism. Originally a special issue of Social Cognition, this book examines the theoretical challenges researchers must overcome to further advance priming studies and considers how these challenges can be met. The volume aims to reduce the confusion surrounding current discussions by more thoroughly considering the many phenomena in social psychology that the term “priming” encompasses, and closely examining the psychological processes that explain when and how different types of priming effects occur.