PRIMING EFFECT

An increase in the speed with which a word is recognised, which results from having recently seen or heard a word that is closely associated with it. Shown the word DOCTOR, a subject recognises words such as NURSE or PATIENT more rapidly than usual– always provided they are presented soon afterwards. DOCTOR is referred to as the prime and PATIENT as the target. The sight of the word DOCTOR is said to prime PATIENT.

Exposure to the prime is represented as activating (or bringing into prominence) a range of associated words. These words then become easier to identify because they are already foregrounded in the mind. The process, known as spreading activation, is highly automatic and not subject to conscious control. Most priming effects are relatively short-lived, and decay quite quickly, thus ensuring that too many lexical items are not activated simultaneously.

Priming effects have given rise to a research method which measures Reaction Time (how long it takes to recognise a word) in order to establish which words are most closely associated with a given prime. The experiments often involve a lexical decision task, where the subject is asked to press a button when he/she sees an actual word rather than a non-word. A comparison is then made between Reaction Times for targets which are associated with the prime and those for targets which are not.

 Experiments often make use of cross-modal priming, where the prime is a spoken stimulus and the target is a visual stimulus on a computer screen. The logic for this is that it enables experimenters to tap into an abstract mental representation of the word which is independent of modality.

Several types of priming can be distinguished:

Repetition priming involves repeating a recently-encountered word. This effect is surprisingly long lived: priming effects have been reported after a delay of several hours. The effects are stronger for low frequency words than for more common ones, a phenomenon known as frequency attentuation. Repetition priming provides evidence of the way a reader traces patterns of coherence in a text by means of recurrent words.

Form-based priming involves words which are orthographically similar. It has proved difficult to demonstrate that, for example, SPRING primes STRING. One explanation is that the two words are in competition with each other to form a match with what is in the stimulus, and thus reduce (inhibit) each other’s activation.

Semantic priming involves words which are semantically related. Strong effects have been recorded with words that fall into the same lexical set (CHAIR-TABLE), antonyms (HOT-COLD), words which share functional properties (BROOM-FLOOR) and superordinate hyponym pairs (BIRD-ROBIN). However, the strength of the effect may depend on the strength of the association: the co-hyponyms CAT and DOG are strongly associated but the similar co-hyponyms PIG and HORSE are not.

See also: Context effects, Research methods, Spreading activation

Further reading: Harley (2001: 145–50)

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