Identity priming of spoken words and pseudowords after minutes or hours

Four experiments tested whether prior incidental exposure to a word or to a pseudoword affected lexical decision performance when the same item was subsequently heard. In two experiments, the interval between initial exposure and test item was 10-20 min. In two other experiments, the interval was 12 hr, either with or without sleep during the 12 hr. Prior exposure to undegraded words had no effect on lexical decision performance-accuracy and reaction times were the same for words with such prior exposure and ones without it. For pseudowords, prior incidental exposure consistently impaired the ability to reject the item as a word, presumably due to an increased sense of familiarity. This effect was still intact after a 12-hr delay. The results are consistent with the idea that words heard under clear conditions rapidly match lexical representations, making recent episodic experience with the word irrelevant. Pseudowords cannot match existing lexical representations, and as a result, their perception is strongly affected by recent episodic experience. The experiments extend prior work on long-term priming and support different functions for episodic and long-term representations of spoken items. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).