Effects of priming in word retrieval

Three studies were carried out to investigate orthographic and semantic priming effects in word retrieval. In this paradigm a prime is presented prior to the definition of a target word. The task is to produce the target word. We view the process of word retrieval as requiring access from a conceptually organized semantic network to an orthographically and phonemically organized lexical network. Primes that were orthographically (and phonemically) related to the target words were found to facilitate word retrieval. Both semantically related and unrelated primes inhibited word retrieval. Inhibition from both of these sources is attributed in part to the orthographic unrelatedness of these primes. This explanation is shown to be consistent with data from several other word retrieval studies (Brown, 1979; Roediger, Neely, & Blaxton, 1983). The word retrieval task is contrasted with the lexical decision task. It is suggested that the differential effects of orthographic and semantic priming in word retrieval and lexical decision are due to differences in retrieval processing between the two tasks.