The effect of semantic priming on the detection of letters within words

Smith (1979) reported an experiment in which subjects were to detect whether or not a displayed word contained a particular target letter. Her data indicated that if the word bearing the target letter was preceded by a semantically related item, the detection of the target letter was faster than it was if the preceding item was unrelated. Those results provided strong support for holistic models of word recognition, in which it is assumed that letter detection must be mediated by prior word recognition. That is, any facilitating effect of the prime on lexical access should be passed on to subsequent letter detection. The present experimental paradigm, which was very similar to (albeit different from) that of Smith, served to explore the generality of her effect, but the results did not confirm her findings. Although a lexical-decision task used in Experiments 2, 5, and 7 provided clear evidence that the priming items employed in these experiments did facilitate lexical processing, a letter-detection task used in Experiments 1, 3, 4, 6, and 8 failed to reveal any facilitating effect of semantic priming on letter detection. The conclusion is that the generality of Smith's effect is far too limited to offer support for holistic models of word recognition.