Are individual differences in masked repetition and semantic priming reliable?

ABSTRACT

Despite the robustness of semantic priming (e.g., cat–DOG), the test-retest and internal reliabilities of semantic priming effects within individuals are surprisingly low. In contrast, repetition priming (e.g., dog–DOG) appears to be far more reliable across a range of conditions. While Stolz and colleagues attribute the low reliability in semantic priming to uncoordinated automatic processes in semantic memory, their use of unmasked priming paradigms makes it difficult to fully rule out the influence of strategic processes. In the present study, we explored the reliability of semantic and repetition priming when primes were heavily masked and cannot be consciously processed. We found that masked repetition, but not semantic, priming effects showed some degree of reliability. Interestingly, skilled lexical processors (as reflected by vocabulary knowledge and spelling ability) also produced larger masked repetition priming effects.

KEYWORDS:

• Masked repetition priming
• masked semantic priming
• lexical decision
• individual differences

Acknowledgements

We thank Jeff Bowers, Jennifer Stolz, and two anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments on an earlier version of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCiD

Melvin J. Yap http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5372-4323

Notes

1 Our results may appear inconsistent with aspects of the individual differences analyses reported by Adelman et al. (2014). Specifically, they observed correlations of −.038 and −.020 between repetition priming and spelling, and between repetition priming and vocabulary respectively (see their Table 6). Collectively, these negative correlations suggest that repetition priming effects are smaller for more skilled readers. However, neither correlation was statistically significant, and more importantly, the analyses used unpronounceable nonwords (e.g., cbhaux—DESIGN) as the unrelated baseline to compute priming. We computed the zero-order correlations between repetition priming, spelling, and vocabulary in the FPP dataset, using both pronounceable and unpronounceable nonword baselines. While correlations were indeed negative when unpronounceable nonwords were used, they became positive when pronounceable words were used; furthermore, all corrections were not statistically significant.

Additional information

Funding

This research was carried out as an Master’s thesis by L. C. T. under the direction of M. J. Y., and was supported in part by an ODPRT Grant for Research Excellence [grant number R-581-000-144-646] to M. J. Y.