The sandwich priming paradigm does not reduce lexical competitor effects.

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Psycholinguistics
• Computational Neuroscience

Background:

• Sandwich priming, a technique involving a preprime-target sequence, enhances orthographic priming effects compared to conventional priming.
• This enhancement was previously attributed to the elimination of lexical competition, a process where similar words inhibit each other.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate whether the elimination of lexical competition underlies the orthographic priming boost observed with sandwich priming.
• To compare priming effects across different preprime conditions (no preprime, target preprime, competitor preprime) and assess their impact on lexical competition.

Main Methods:

• Three lexical decision experiments were conducted using various related prime conditions (replaced-letters, shared neighbor, transposed-all-letter nonwords).
• Simulations with a competitive network model were used to predict priming effects under different preprime conditions.

Main Results:

• Contrary to model predictions, a competitor preprime did not attenuate but sometimes reversed the priming effect.
• The competitor preprime facilitated priming effects that were absent in the conventional (no preprime) condition.

Conclusions:

• The observed boost in orthographic priming with sandwich priming is not due to reduced lexical competition.
• Prelexical processes in word recognition are likely responsible for the enhanced orthographic priming effects seen in the sandwich paradigm.