The present research examines semantic priming from attended and unattended parafoveal words. Participants made a lexical decision in response to a single central target. The target was preceded by two parafoveal prime words, with one of them (the attended prime) being precued by a peripheral cue. The main variables manipulated across experiments were cue informativeness (valid vs. neutral cues) and stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) between prime and probe (200, 300, 600, or 1,000 ms). The results showed (a) reliable semantic priming from both attended and ignored prime words and (b) that the ignored priming effects were either negative or positive, depending on both the prime-probe SOA and cue informativeness. The present findings are discussed in relation to inhibitory versus episodic retrieval models of negative priming.

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The influence of spatial attention on lexical decisions to lateralized target letter-strings appearing either along with a distractor (Experiment 1) or in an otherwise empty field (Experiments 2–6) was examined. Attentional orienting was controlled by peripheral (Experiments 1, 2, 3, and 6) and central (Experiments 4–5) cuing methods. Manipulations of spatial attention, including cue validity and cue–target stimulus onset asynchrony, were combined with manipulations of word frequency in Experiments 3–6. All the attentional manipulations were effective, but they did not modify the right visual field advantage in word performance. In addition, the attentional effects did not interact with either the presence or absence of distractors or with stimulus familiarity. Implications of these results regarding the influence of spatial attention (the posterior attention system) on word processing are discussed.

The present study investigated whether semantic negative priming from single prime words depends on the availability of cognitive control resources. Participants with high vs. low working memory capacity (as assessed by their performance in complex span and attentional control tasks) were instructed to either attend to or ignore a briefly presented single prime word that was followed by either a semantically related or unrelated target word on which participants made a lexical decision. Individual differences in working memory capacity (WMC) mainly affected the processing of the ignored primes, but not the processing of the attended primes: While the latter produced reliable positive semantic priming for both high- and low-WMC participants, the former gave rise to reliable semantic negative priming only for high WMC participants, with low WMC participants showing the opposite positive priming effect. The present results extend previous findings in demonstrating that (a) single negative priming can reliably generalize to semantic associates of the prime words, and (b) a differential availability of cognitive control resources can reliably modulate the negative priming effect at a semantic level of representation.