The effect of target context and cue type in a postcue wordpronunciation task

摘要

Dallas and Merikle (, ) demonstrated that when participants were presented with a pair of words for over 1 s and subsequently cued to pronounce one of the words aloud (postcue task) semantic priming effects occurred. Humphreys, Lloyd-Jones, and Fias () failed to replicate this postcue semantic priming effect using word pairs that were semantic category co-ordinates. The aim of Experiment 1 was to determine if the disparate postcue task results reported by these researchers could be accounted for by the prime-target contexts or cue types engaging different attentional processes or a combination of these factors. A postcue pronunciation task was used and word pairs presented were taken from an associate-semantic context and a semantic category context. In the Dallas and Merikle condition the line cue flanked the location in which the target word was previously shown. In the Humphreys et al. condition the cue word UPPER or lower was centrally presented and indicated the location in which the target word previously appeared. Results demonstrated that the occurrence of semantic and associate-semantic priming effects under postcue task conditions varied for the two cue types. Experiment 2 investigated if these results were attributable to a between subjectmanipulation of cue type. Using a fully repeated measures design priming effectswere evident for top located targets in both the associate-semantic and semanticprime-target contexts. Experiment 3 used a between subjects design to rule outthe possibility that carry over effects between cue and context conditionscontributed to the postcue task priming effects. Priming was evident for toplocated targets in an associate-semantic and semantic context for the line cue.For the word cue there was priming for top located targets from anassociate-semantic context and a reverse priming effect for top located targetsfrom the semantic context. Possible explanations for the occurrence of primingeffects under postcue task conditions are discussed.