THEORIES OF PRIMING .2. TYPES OF PRIMES

In 4 lexical-decision experiments, words were primed by associatively related words, unrelated words, neutral primes, or nonwords. The associative relations between the critical targets and the targets on preceding trials were also manipulated. The speed and the accuracy of responses were virtually identical in the unrelated-word, neutral, and nonword prime conditions. Between-trials semantic priming was the same size in all of these conditions. These results cause problems for non-spreading-activation (e.g., compound-cue) models of associative priming. These models predict either that neutral and nonword primes should facilitate or inhibit lexical decisions on the targets (with the direction of the effect dependent on specific assumptions) or that more between-trials priming should occur in these conditions relative to the unrelated-word prime condition. In contrast, the results are easily explained by spreading-activation models.