ABSTRACT
In 1971, David E.Meyer and Roger W.Schvaneveldt published an article in the Journal of Experimental Psychology entitled “Facilitation in Recognizing Pairs of Words: Evidence of a Dependence Between Retrieval Operations.” This article would become one of the most influential articles published in cognitive psychology. In the first experiment, 12 high-school students were asked to decide whether two simultaneously presented strings of letters were both words (e.g., table-grass) or not (e.g., marb-bread). Of the word-word pairs, half were semantically related (e.g., nurse-doctor) and half were not (e.g., breaddoor). On the average, responses were 85 milliseconds (ms) faster to related pairs than to unrelated pairs. This phenomenon came to be known as “semantic priming.” As evidence of the impact of this discovery, consider that this article, the published version of James Neely’s dissertation (Neely, 1977), and Neely’s 1991 review chapter (Neely, 1991) had received, collectively, more than 2,500 citations as of November of 2004 (ISI Web of Science).
