ABSTRACT
The processing of a word during language comprehension involves accessing stored information about its meaning. Since the early experiments reported by Meyer and Schvaneveldt (1971), there has been little doubt that the context in which a word is presented can influence the way its meaning is accessed. In their experiment, subjects had to decide if two simultaneously presented visual letter strings were English words. They found that displays containing two related words (e.g., doctor-nurse) produced faster and more accurate responses than displays containing two unrelated words (e.g., bread-nurse). These results have been replicated many times with different priming procedures (e.g., Balota & Chumbley, 1984; Neely, 1977, Tweedy, Lapinski, & Schvaneveldt, 1977). Many of these procedures involve the presentation of a single word (the prime) to which no overt response is required, followed by the presentation of a second word or letter string (the target) to which subjects are required to make a word/nonword decision. In this procedure, a related prime provides a semantic context and facilitates response.
