ABSTRACT
THE BASIS OF MASKED PRIMING EFFECTS A priming effect is demonstrated when a priming stimulus sharing features with a subsequently presented target stimulus enhances performance in a task involving the processing of that target, relative to an appropriate (unrelated) control-priming condition. With specific regard to the use of masked priming to measure lexical access mechanisms, if priming stimuli in two conditions vary with respect to their similarity to targets on a single information parameter (e.g., phonology, orthography), then a priming effect may be attributed to the automatic processing of the more similar prime on that parameter by lexical access mechanisms.
