Word Priming and Interference Paradigms

Abstract

In word priming and interference studies, researchers typically present participants with pairs of words (called primes and targets) and assess how the processing of the targets (e.g., "nurse") is affected by different types of primes (e.g., semantically related and unrelated primes, such as "doctor" and "spoon"). Priming and interference paradigms have been used to study a broad range of issues concerning the structure of the mental lexicon and the ways linguistic representations are accessed during word comprehension and production. In this chapter, we illustrate the use of the paradigms in two exemplary studies, and then discuss the factors researchers need to take into account when selecting their stimuli, designing their experiments, and analyzing the results.