SPaM: a combined self-paced reading and masked-priming paradigm

In this article, we validate an experimental paradigm, SPaM, that we first described elsewhere (Luke & Christianson, Memory & Cognition 40:628-641, 2012). SPaM is a synthesis of self-paced reading and masked priming. The primary purpose of SPaM is to permit the study of sentence context effects on early word recognition. In the experiment reported here, we show that SPaM successfully reproduces results from both the self-paced reading and masked-priming literatures. We also outline the advantages and potential uses of this paradigm. For users of E-Prime, the experimental program can be downloaded from our lab website, http://epl.beckman.illinois.edu/.