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Updated: Jul 17, 2026

Comparing the Frequency Effect Between the Lexical Decision and Naming Tasks in Chinese
Published on: April 1, 2016
Long-term priming of neighbours biases the word recognition process: evidence from a lexical decision task
Eric-Jan Wagenmakers1, Jeroen G W Raaijmakers
1Department of Psychology, University of Amesterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. ewagenmakers@fmg.uva.nl
Abstract:
The role of orthographically similar words (i.e., neighbours) in the word recognition process has been studied extensively using short-term priming paradigms (e.g., Colombo, 1986). Here we demonstrate that long-term effects of neighbour priming can also be obtained. Experiment 1 showed that prior study of a neighbour (e.g., TANGO) increased later lexical decision performance for similar words (e.g., MANGO), but decreased performance for similar pseudowords (e.g., LANGO). Experiment 2 replicated this bias effect and showed that the increase in lexical decision performance due to neighbour priming is selectively due to words from a relatively sparse neighbourhood. Explanations of the bias effect in terms of lexical activation and episodic memory retrieval are discussed.
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