Assignment – Semantic Priming

Part 1 | Overview & Importance / Contribution of Semantic Priming Studies

Semantic priming is defined as the occurrence of a given word stimulus that alters the state of
memory of semantically related words, which results in less processing time and less time to make
lexical decisions (Benthin, McCarthy & Wood, 1985). It is a procedure to determine time taken to
process the meaning of a word when a word is primed to a subject. This procedure has been used
in research regarding many test subjects such as children and adults alike and it has two meanings
which are ‘internal activation’ and ‘performance difference’ (Chapman, Chapman, Curran &
Miller, 1994). Semantic priming is carried out usually by presenting a stimulus, usually written
words or pictures, as a prompt for the subject and time taken for the subject to process and make
lexical decisions is noted. Semantic priming is used as a tool to examine several perception and
cognition aspects such as word recognition, knowledge representation and discourse
comprehension. The aspects also include the spread of activation between related concepts in a
semantic network (Collins & Loftus, 1975), consistency of activation of overlapping micro
features in a distributed memory system (Masson, 1991) and the use of prime and target to form a
compound cue to search semantic memory (McKoon & Ratcliff, 1992). Priming is the implicit
memory effect where the response towards a subsequent stimulus is influenced by the exposure to
a certain stimulus repetition such as perceptual, semantic or conceptual stimulus. Thus, priming is
said to have an effect on the decision making process (Jacoby, 1983).

Semantic priming plays a vital role in our daily lives as it has contributed to the
psycholinguistic, neurolinguistic field and learning processes. It is also important in influencing
our habit and decision-making process, contributing to the understanding of semantic priming
deficits, reading and comprehension disabilities. Priming experiments is vital in
neuropsychological study of semantic memory as it contributes to a great understanding of the
representation and access of semantic information. Semantic priming enables us to differentiate
patients’ loss of or damage to information in semantic memory and voluntary access to that
information based on the performance of their semantic memory tests. Furthermore, through
semantic priming, the detailed pattern of loss and preservation of different types of semantic
1
information can be analysed by mapping the prime effects for various types of words and the
various semantic relationships between primes and targets (Moss & Tyler, 1995). Semantic
priming also plays an important role in our daily lives as it influences our perceptions, emotions
and actions which eventually turns into our behavior and how we interpret information.

Besides, semantic priming also facilitates the identification of both pictures and words
which makes the learning process of children and students easier as there is a common semantic
system between word-picture pairs. Picture-picture pairs also portray great overlapping of visual
features between prime and target as they share general commonalities in appearance which
enhance the memory of that particular information as well as increase the spread of activation.
Semantic priming can be utilized as a learning tool for students to tackle new intimidating materials
by presenting information before a lesson is given by teachers or educators. Besides, it is frequently
used as an educational intervention for students with certain learning disabilities. These techniques
allow students to have a ‘preview’ of the lesson beforehand, thus making the students more familiar
with the information and materials, improve their attention during the actual lesson and enhance
their memory on that particular lesson material.

Furthermore, the study of lexical–semantic priming effects during infancy conducted by

Arias-Trejo and Plunkett (2009) revealed that infants have begun to develop semantic-associative
linkages between lexical items as early as 21 months of age as the recognition of words is
facilitated by word priming while the development of auditory lexicons is facilitated by auditory
word priming. Apart from that, semantic priming also contributes to our understanding of the
nature of semantic impairment. In neurolinguistic priming studies, the results revealed that access
impairment is the cause of semantic deficits in aphasic and dementia of the Alzheimer type (DAT)
patients (Hagoort, 1998). Semantic priming on people will bring about the mental effect on
individuals as the study conducted by Hagood and Gruenewald (2018) showed that negative aging
stereotypes were primed on the elderly which resulted in their increase of feelings of loneliness,
helplessness and lower self-evaluation of ability and functioning. Semantic priming experiments
also show that children with reading disability (RD) have similar pattern of semantic priming
deficits in auditory lexical decisions and semantic

2
deficits which is caused by the reading disability in particular that may lead to both the word
reading and the comprehension problems in RD children (Betjemann and Keenan, 2008).

Part 2 | Summary & Effectiveness of Methodology in Semantic-Priming Studies

Article 1: Semantic Priming Effects on Picture and Word Processing by Richard D. Sperber,
Charley McCauley, Ronnie D. Ragain & CArolyne M. Weil
This research examined the automatic type of semantic priming based on the inference from the
response time to targets in related pairs to identify stimuli (label picture or read words) as quickly
as possible by the subjects. In the study, the stimuli were presented in pairs (a prime followed by
a target), with half of the pairs consisting of concepts with similar semantic categorywhile the
other half consisted of unrelated concepts. Identification of both pictures (Experiment 1) and words
(Experiment 2) was discovered to be mediated by semantic relatedness. In both experiments, the
interaction between semantic relatedness and stimulus quality indicated that semantic priming
influenced the initial encoding of both types of stimuli. In Experiment 3, pairs of pictures, pairs of
words and mixed pairs consisting of a picture and a word or a word and a picture were received
by the subjects. The results showed that semantic priming mediated the identification of both
pictures and words. Significant priming effects on mix and unmixed pairs were obtained,
supporting the assumption that the semantic information of pictures and words were accessed from
a common semantic store. It was reported that a significant greater priming was seen in picture-
picture pairs than in word-word or mixed pairs. This indicated that not only priming is facilitated
by a semantic system, but also the priming in picture-picture pairs is mediated by the overlapping
of visual features prevalent to the pictorial representation of objects from the same semantic
category.

Article 2: Lexical-Semantic Priming Effects During Infancy by Natalia Arias-Trejo & Kim
Plunkett
This research aims to find semantic-associative relatedness of words during early lexical
development by using quantitative analysis. Intermodal preferential looking (IPL) task is used to
investigate deep into this matter. Two groups of infants at 18 and 21 months old are being
3
observed as those age are the crucial period in early word learning. Four lexical-semanticpriming
relationships are used as conditions which are (i) prime-target (e.g cat-dog) (ii) prime-look (e.g.
cat-look), (iii) neutral-target (e.g. plate-dog) and (iv) neutral-look (e.g. plate look). Simply put,
target conditions means the target image is named, look conditions means the target image is
unnamed and for neutral conditions the stimulus images are unrelated to theprime word. A
total of 24 prime words are used as the experiment basis. The study is thendivided into three
experiments with three different objectives. First experiment is to identify the relationship between
semantic-associative with infants’ lexicons, second experiment is thenbeing simplified to find
better findings for 18-months old infants group and the third experiment is to reveal whether there
are memory constraints due to the failure of infants identifying the target object. ANOVA is used
to analyse the findings with factors of relationship, labelling and age as subjects. Overall
conclusion find out that clearly for 21-months old infants, they have developed their mental lexicon
that encodes the semantic-associative relationships betweenwords while for 18 months old infants,
it is undeniable that they have developed those relationships, but the categorizational of the words
is still unclear which make the recognition of lexical-semantic priming a bit slower and difficult
relatively to 21 months old infants.

Article 3: Semantic Priming: A Methodological Study with Young Children by Emily

Rusnak, Tim Brackenbury & Mary Hare
This research whether priming occurs in “child-sensitive” procedures with children under age 6
and whether one procedure is preferable to the other with young children. In the study, preschool-
aged children were observed on their potential utility and ease of administration. Two pilot studies
were carried out. In the first, subjects were primed with 64 stock photos of common objects as a
stimuli for a picture naming task and categorization, as the pilot study is to create an agreeable
stimuli for the experiment. The second pilot study was carried out to ensure procedures and priming
apparatus which results in the main experiment, where 34 kids aged 4 and 5 were observed. The
kids are monolingual English speakers and were primed with pictures and audio recording for them
to complete their task, which are picture naming and repeating words. Children were prompted
with pictures in the picture naming task and asked to name it fast, and

4
 for the cued shadowing task, pictures and a headset microphone plays shadow words audio to help
children speak the pair of the shadow words, which are target words, such as ‘key’ leads to ‘door.’
One-way ANOVA method was used to determine results and result showed that there is no
“differential priming effects across related and unrelated word pairs” (Rusnak, Brackenbury&
Hare, 2009), although “semantic priming is still a promising method for research with young
children” (Rusnak, Brackenbury & Hare, 2009). This study indicates that semantic priming is
important in the development of information regarding research with young children.

Based on the three studies, there are various methods used in identifying the semantic
priming. There is no way of choosing which method carries maximum effectiveness as the method
used in three studies above catered for different age groups. As for article 5: Lexical-Semantic
Priming Effects During Infancy, the methods used are focusing on audio and visual stimuli and only
24 basic noun as prime words are used as the experiments are conducted on 18 and 21 months olds
infants which as far as we know, the attention span for infant is super short and their amount of
vocabulary are still limited compared to toddler. So, the experiments that last less than two minutes
each, assisted by familiar words and audio and visual stimuli will help to gain their attention within
the attention span. As for article 8: Semantic Priming: A Methodological Study with Young Children,
the study focuses on children aged between 4 to 5 years old. The study assigned tasks to the children
by picture naming, semantic categorization and cued shadowing which are a bit complicated to be
used on infants. This method on the other hand, suits the children with age mentioned above as their
amount of vocabulary has increased and the knowledge based on learning and what they have
acquired from surrounding has expanded over years. Plus, children will always find the tasks to be
an interesting adventure for them instead of taking it as a study conducted on them. Next, for study
in Article 1: Semantic Priming Effects on Picture and Word Processing, the stimuli used is taken to
another level by involving black and white drawing and instead of naming the picture, they were
asked to read the words thatappeared on the slides. As this study is conducted on undergraduate
students, which definitelyhas fully developed the basic sense of reading and writing, the tasks surely
suits this age group to identify their semantic priming with lesser components involved instead the
study depends on

5
their reaction in identifying the semantic priming in pictures and word processing. As we can
see, the variation of method and degree of difficulties increases relatively to the age based on the
groups the study is conducted. There is no one solid method that can be used to identify semantic
priming for the whole generation. Thus, the variation of method in studying this field is indeed
needed to get the most accurate results to cater the differences of participants.

6
 References

Arias-Trejo, N., & Plunkett, K. (2009). Lexical–semantic priming effects during infancy.
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 364(1536),
3633-3647.

Bentin, S., McCarthy, G., & Wood, C. C. (1985). Event-related potentials, lexical decision and
semantic priming. Electroencephalography and clinical Neurophysiology, 60(4), 343-
355.

Betjemann, R. S., & Keenan, J. M. (2008). Phonological and semantic priming in children with
reading disability. Child Development, 79(4), 1086-1102.

Chapman, L. J., Chapman, J. P., Curran, T. E., & Miller, M. B. (1994). Do children and the elderly
show heightened semantic priming? How to answer the question. DevelopmentalReview,
14(2), 159-185.

Collins, A. M., & Loftus, E. F. (1975). A spreading activation theory of semantic processing.
Psychological Review, 82(6), 407.

Draine, S. C., & Greenwald, A. G. (1998). Replicable unconscious semantic priming. Journal of
Experimental Psychology: General, 127(3), 286.

Hagood, E. W., & Gruenewald, T. L. (2018). Positive versus negative priming of older adults’
generative value: Do negative messages impair memory?. Aging & mental health, 22(2),
257-260.

Hagoort, P. (1998). The shadows of lexical meanings in patients with lexical impairments. In B.
Stemmer & H. Whitaker (Eds.), Handbook of Neurolinguistics (pp. 235–248). SanDiego,
CA: Academic Press.

Jacoby, L. L. (1983). Perceptual enhancement: Persistent effect of an experience. Journal of

Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 15, 930-940.

Masson, M. E. J. (1991). A distributed memory model of context effects in word identification.

In D. Besner & G. W. Humphreys (Eds.), Basic processes in reading: Visual word
recognition (pp. 233-263). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

McKoon, G., & Ratcliff, R. (1992). Spreading activation versus compound cue accounts of
priming: Mediated priming revisited. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning,
Memory and Cognition, 18(6), 1155.

Moss, H. E., & Tyler, L. K. (1995). Investigating semantic memory impairments: The contribution
of semantic priming. Memory, 3, 359-395.

7
Rusnak, E., Brackenbury, T., & Hare, M. (2009, November). Semantic priming: a
methodological study with young children. Paper presented at the American
Speech-Language-Hearing Association Convention, Ohio United States.
Retrieved from
https://www.asha.org/Events/convention/handouts/2009/1910_Rusnak_Emily_2/

Sperber, R. D., McCauley, C., Ragain, R. D., & Weil, C. M. (1979). Semantic priming
effects onpicture and word processing. Memory & Cognition, 7(5), 339-345.