Integrative priming occurs rapidly and uncontrollably during lexical processing.

Full Abstract

Lexical priming, whereby a prime word facilitates recognition of a related target word (e.g., nurse --> doctor), is typically attributed to association strength, semantic similarity, or compound familiarity. Here, the authors demonstrate a novel type of lexical priming that occurs among unassociated, dissimilar, and unfamiliar concepts (e.g., horse --> doctor). Specifically, integrative priming occurs when a prime word can be easily integrated with a target word to create a unitary representation. Across several manipulations of timing (stimulus onset asynchrony) and list context (relatedness proportion), lexical decisions for the target word were facilitated when it could be integrated with the prime word. Moreover, integrative priming was dissociated from both associative priming and semantic priming but was comparable in terms of both prevalence (across participants) and magnitude (within participants). This observation of integrative priming challenges present models of lexical priming, such as spreading activation, distributed representation, expectancy, episodic retrieval, and compound cue models. The authors suggest that integrative priming may be explained by a role activation model of relational integration. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2009 APA, all rights reserved).

Author information

Author/s: Estes, Zachary (Z); Jones, Lara L (LL);

Affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Warwick, UK. z.estes(-atsign-)warwick.ac.uk

Journal and publication information

Publication Type: Journal Article

Journal: Journal of experimental psychology. General (J Exp Psychol Gen), published in United States. (Language: eng)

Reference: 2009-Feb; vol 138 (issue 1) : pp 112-30

Dates: Created 2009/02/10; Completed 2009/03/30;

PMID: 19203172, status: MEDLINE (last retrieval date: 3/30/2009, IMS Date: 30 Mar 2009 00:00:00)

Sourced from the National Library of Medicine. Abstract text and other information may be subject to copyright.

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