Contextual facilitation in a letter search task depends on how the prime is processed.

In a variety of situations it has been observed that the processing of a verbal stimulus is facilitated when it is preceded by an associated word. This article is concerned with determining whether such facilitation occurs automatically upon prime presentation or whether facilitation depends on the manner of processing the prime. Experiment 1 demonstrated that a letter search in a target word was facilitated when the target was preceded by either an identical or semantically associated word. If, however, a letter search was required in the prime as well as in the target (Experiment 2), the relative advantage enjoyed by targets preceded by identical-word primes disappeared. Experiment 3 replicated this loss of facilitation using semantically associated word pairs. Contextual facilitation thus appears to depend upon the mode of analysis of the prime. If the prime is analyzed as a meaningful unit, facilitation occurs. If, however, it is subjected to a more discrete, letter-by-letter analysis, the priming effect vanishes.

[1]  G. M. Reicher.  Perceptual recognition as a function of meaninfulness of stimulus material. , 1969, Journal of experimental psychology.

[2]  Ira Fischler,et al.  Associative facilitation without expectancy in a lexical decision task. , 1977 .

[3]  W. Estes.  The Locus of Inferential and Perceptual Processes in Letter Identification. , 1975 .

[4]  Edward E. Smith,et al.  Expectancy as a determinant of functional units in perceptual recognition , 1971 .

[5]  D E Meyer,et al.  Meaning, memory structure, and mental processes. , 1976, Science.

[6]  E. Rosch.  Cognitive Representations of Semantic Categories. , 1975 .

[7]  F. Craik,et al.  Levels of Pro-cessing: A Framework for Memory Research , 1975 .

[8]  J. Lewis,et al.  Semantic processing of unattended messages using dichotic listening. , 1970, Journal of experimental psychology.

[9]  James J. Jenkins,et al.  THE 1952 MINNESOTA WORD ASSOCIATION NORMS , 1970 .

[10]  E. Gibson,et al.  The role of grapheme-phoneme correspondence in the perception of words. , 1962, The American journal of psychology.

[11]  Allan Collins,et al.  A spreading-activation theory of semantic processing , 1975 .

[12]  J. H. Neely.  Semantic priming and retrieval from lexical memory: Roles of inhibitionless spreading activation and limited-capacity attention. , 1977 .

[13]  J. H. Neely.  Semantic priming and retrieval from lexical memory: Evidence for facilitatory and inhibitory processes , 1976, Memory & cognition.

[14]  L. E. Krueger,et al.  Letter search through words and nonwords: The effect of fixed, absent, or mutilated targets , 1976, Memory & cognition.

[15]  M. Posner,et al.  Attention and cognitive control. , 1975 .

[16]  J. Morton.  7 – A Functional Model for Memory1 , 1970 .

[17]  Saul Sternberg,et al.  The discovery of processing stages: Extensions of Donders' method , 1969 .

[18]  M. C. Smith,et al.  Theories of the psychological refractory period. , 1967, Psychological bulletin.

[19]  H. H. Clark.  The language-as-fixed-effect fallacy: A critique of language statistics in psychological research. , 1973 .

[20]  R W Schvaneveldt,et al.  Semantic-context effects on word recognition: Influence of varying the proportion of items presented in an appropriate context , 1977, Memory & cognition.

[21]  L. E. Krueger.  Search time in a redundant visual display. , 1970, Journal of experimental psychology.