ABSTRACT

Lag refers to the number of items that intervene between the prime and the target. The standard priming paradigm uses a lag of zero; the target immediately follows the prime. In lag-1 priming, the prime and the target are separated by one unrelated word (e.g., lion, table, tiger). Many studies have examined priming at lags of one, two, and even greater. The early literature on lag effects was ambiguous (for reviews, see Joordens and Besner, 1992; Masson, 1995; Neely, 1991). More recent investigations have shown that priming occurs over lags of at least one. Balota and Paul (1996), Joordens and Besner (1992), and McNamara (1992b) obtained priming at a lag of one in lexical decision, naming, or both. Averaged across those experiments, semantic priming at lag 1 was exactly half the magnitude of semantic priming at lag 0 in lexical decision (13 vs. 26 ms) and in naming (5 vs. 10 ms, but see Masson, 1995, for a demonstration of an absence of lag-1 priming in naming). McNamara (1992b) did not obtain priming at a lag of two in the lexical decision task.