Lexical Priming

Lexical priming is a linguistic theory which seeks to relate corpus‐linguistic concepts such as collocation and colligation to the experimental findings of psycholinguists interested in the retardation and acceleration of word association. In one such set of experiments informants are given a word or image (referred to as a prime) and then a target word; the speed with which the target word is recognized is measured. Some primes are found to retard recognition and others to accelerate recognition. In another set of experiments informants are exposed to a particular word combination and then, after exposure to other combinations, are reexposed to the original combination; the speed of recognition is again measured. The evidence suggests that the initial exposure accelerates recognition of the combination on reexposure and improves its quality. This is known as repetition priming. The lexical priming claim makes use of repetition priming and says that whenever listeners or readers encounter a word (or a syllable or a combination of words), they note subconsciously the linguistic context in which it occurs and, as a result of repeated encounters, come to identify the words that characteristically accompany it (its collocations), the grammatical patterns it is associated with (its colligations), the meanings it is associated with (its semantic associations), the pragmatics it is associated with (its pragmatic associations), and other recurrent features of the context.