Authors: Wendy De Moor Tom Verguts
Publish Date: 2005/05/28
Volume: 70, Issue: 5, Pages: 359-366
Abstract
Using masked priming Segui and Grainger 1990 reported inhibitory effects of higher frequency neighbours on lower frequency targets eg avec – AVEU but not of lower frequency neighbours on higher frequency targets eg aveu – AVEC Conversely with unmasked conscious priming they observed inhibition for word pairs of the type “aveu – AVEC” but not for word pairs of the type “avec – AVEU” Both inhibitory effects were explained in terms of the frequency difference between the prime and the target We argue that the observed inhibitory effects may emerge from the absolute frequency of the prime or the target rather than their relative frequency To test this we investigated inhibitory effects between neighbour words of the same frequency under both masked and unmasked priming conditions The results showed inhibition for samefrequency neighbours in case the prime and the target were highfrequency words but not in case the prime and the target were lowfrequency words The theoretical implications of the findings are discussed within the context of interactive activation based models eg Grainger Jacobs 1996 McClelland Rumelhart 1981We thank Filip Van Opstal for his assistance in running the experiment and Marc Brysbaert for useful comments on this research Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Wendy De Moor Department of Psychology Henri Dunantlaan 2 9000 Ghent Belgium Email WendyDemoorUGentbe
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