Rapid activation of the lexicon: a further investigation with behavioral and computational results.

ABSTRACT

Priming effects were observed in a categorization task for both prime-target synonym pairs (e.g., boat-ship) and first-associate pairs (e.g., boat-sea). However, the amount and onset of priming were different for synonyms and associated pairs. The effect appeared sooner for synonyms (at prime duration of 43 ms) than for associated words (57 ms onset) but was present for both these relationships at 71 ms of prime presentation. A prime visibility pretest was conducted with the same participants in order to determine the rate of recognition of our prime words. Last, a French matrix of the HAL model was built, which showed that synonyms pairs were semantically closer than associated pairs. These results are in accordance with our previous study (Frenck-Mestre & Bueno, 1999) and are discussed in relation with semantic models, such as Plaut's (1995) distributed model.