Semantic priming effects in visual word recognition : A selective review of current findings and theories

Nearly two decades have elapsed since Meyer and Schvaneveldt (1971) reported their seminal experiment on semantic priming. In their experiment, subjects were either to press one key if both of two simultaneously presented visual letter strings were English words or to press another key otherwise. Unsurprisingly, subjects were faster and more accurate in responding to displays containing two semantically/associatively related words (e.g., bread and butter) than to displays with two unrelated words (e.g., doctor and butter). Despite its intuitive simplicity, Meyer and Schvaneveldt's semantic priming effect spawned an exponential growth in the number of published papers that examined the general issue of how word recognition is influenced by semantic context. Given the extensive research literature that now exists on this topic, it seems reasonable eighteen years later to pause and review the empirical and theoretical productsthat literature has yielded. My contribution to this volume attempts to provide such a review.