Repetition Priming and Frequency Attenuation in Lexical Access

Kenneth I. Forster, Chris Davis · Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition · 1984 · cognitive-psychology · 10.1037/0278-7393.10.4.680 · record forster-davis1984-masked-repetition
tag layer · index · concepts · authors · עברית
Where this record's text came from. faceted 2026-08 by reading the locally held text (corpus-body); every evidence string verified as an exact substring of that text before merging. The extraction has scattered OCR corruption inside otherwise readable prose - 'Oh'phant' for 'Oliphant', 'presehted' for 'presented', 'lope' for 'logic', 'might well'detect' for 'might well detect'. I reproduced these errors exactly rather than silently correcting them, so the quotes pass the substring check; readers should not take the misspellings as mine. Two relations to Evett and Humphreys (1981) exist in the paper - a positive one (quoted, replicating their masked repetition effect) and a negative one about graphemic priming; I omitted the negative one because its sentence is broken in the extraction by an intruding page header ('these results are in sharp contrast to those of Evett and Hump. 7 686 KENNETH I. FORSTER AND CHRIS DAVIS phreys (1981)') and I would have had to stitch it. Replication status = 'replicated' is internal and grounded in the paper: Experiment 5 is described as providing a clear replication of Experiment 1, and Experiment 4 Phase 1 reproduces the masked effect a third time. 2026-08-19 and 2026-08-25 schema-0.3 passes: every quote verified as an exact substring of the staged text and anchored at merge time; concept terms verified present; every edge endpoint an existing node.
How to read this page. The article itself is not reproduced here — this paper is not cleared for redistribution, so what follows is the tag layer alone. The evidence sentences are withheld with the article. The table at the foot lists every tag the record carries; each row names the facet it belongs to, and the whose words column says whether the tag records the paper's own wording or the tagger's sentence about the paper. Every tag links to each other paper in the corpus carrying it. The machine-readable edition of the same thing is the TEI file beside this one, where the tags live in standOff, and the article is at its publisher via the link below. When we have changed our mind. Some entries in the table begin with a word in capitals and the reason for it. EVIDENCE CORRECTED — the finding still stands, but we had quoted the wrong sentence from the paper, and the quotation has been replaced with the right one. RETRACTED — the entry itself was wrong; it stays on the page, marked, with the reason, rather than being deleted. WITHDRAWN AND REPLACED — the entry was wrong, and a corrected version of it appears in the entries below. Each mark carries its own reason, in brackets, because the reasons differ from one entry to the next. An entry we have WITHDRAWN is removed from this page and kept in the record, with its reason. A line reading Audit and a date is a later re-reading of the entry against its whole sentence: DOUBTFUL means it was kept, and the reason says what is loose about it. Quotation marks inside the tagger's sentence. Where a tag is the tagger's own sentence, a phrase in quotation marks inside it is borrowed from the paper — the tagger's wording around it is not. The paper's own sentence is the evidence quote for that row; on this page it is withheld with the article, and the article is at its publisher. Nothing inside quotation marks anywhere on this page is ours: if it is quoted, it is the paper's. Whose words a concept carries. A concept entry records a term the paper itself uses, so the term, the sense given for it, and its evidence are the paper's own words, quoted where the paper fixes them. This is the opposite of a sense entry in the tag table, which is the tagger's sentence about how the paper uses a term. Where a concept entry could not be grounded in the paper's words, the entry says so on its own row.
Other fields define these differently the same word, defined another way in another discipline
episodic memory 3 fields · standard-deviation 3 fields · repetition priming 2 fields · statistical-significance 2 fields · frequency 2 fields · variance 2 fields

Tags on this paper

Every tag the record carries, each linking to every other paper in the corpus that carries it. A tag appears here whether or not its words occur in the article — the spans below are only the ones a sentence in this paper licenses. Of the 7 concept tags on this paper, 5 are grounded in a quoted sentence. 4 carry the tagger's gloss of what the term means in this paper, which is not something the article can license.
masked repetition priming lexical access frequency attenuation repetition effects episodic memory episodic trace episodic effect masked priming repetition priming frequency prime lexical decision word frequency hypothesis-testing mean mean of p-value standard-deviation standard deviations statistical-significance variance behavioural-experiment

Legend

relation to other workclaim_relationshow this paper stands to another: agrees, contradicts, extends, qualifies
claim typeclaim_typethe shape of the claim: existence, mechanism, method, critique, prediction, null
concept edgeconcept_edgesan asserted relation between two concepts, with the sentence asserting it
conceptconceptsan idea the paper works with, quoted where the paper uses it
content tagcontent_tagsa finding, definition, quantity, statistic or variable named in the paper
controlcontrolsan experiment run to eliminate a rival explanation
limitationlimitationswhat the paper says its evidence cannot support
methodmethodhow the paper produced its evidence
phenomenonphenomenonthe effect or regularity under study
sensesensesa distinct use of a term, quoted where the paper fixes it

The paper

The full text is not reproduced here. This article is not cleared for redistribution, so the page carries the tag layer only. Its evidence sentences are withheld; the grounding status remains with each tag, and the article itself is at https://doi.org/10.1037/0278-7393.10.4.680. The reading view exists for the papers whose licence permits it.

Every tag on this page

claim_relations 3 · claim_type 1 · concept_edges 2 · concepts 5 · content_tags 6 · controls 2 · limitations 4 · method 1 · phenomenon 1 · senses 4

Relations on this page carry a quotation for the claim. Where a relation was separately evidenced — and so tested against the vocabulary for its type — the row says so; none of 2 relations here carry that mark. The rest are the tagger’s reading of the sentence quoted beside them.

This record holds no mechanisms. A layer is empty when the tagger recorded nothing in it — which is not the same as the paper having nothing to record.

facettagfieldconf.whose words
claim_typemechanism
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
claim_typethe paper's words
phenomenonmasked repetition priming and frequency attenuation in lexical decision
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phenomenonthe paper's words
methodbehavioural-experiment
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methodthe paper's words
limitationsThe data cannot distinguish time-based decay of the masked effect from interference by intervening items.
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limitations[0]the tagger's words
limitationsWhether context items can ever produce a standard long-term frequency-sensitive effect is left open.
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limitations[1]the tagger's words
limitationsExperiment 4's repetition effect was too weak for the frequency interaction of central interest to be interpretable.
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limitations[2]the tagger's words
limitationsThe absence of a nontarget-priming effect may reflect low power rather than a true null.
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limitations[3]the tagger's words
controlstwo sets of materials were built so that a repeated item in one set was preceded by the same context in the other, counterbalancing across the Repetition factor
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eliminates: that the repetition effect is an item effect - that repeated and unrepeated items are simply different words · outcome (stated by the tagger, no quotation): held
controls[0]0.95the tagger's words
controlshigh-frequency words were included as a control against the low-frequency items
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eliminates: that the repetition-induced variance increase is a general property rather than one specific to low-frequency words · outcome (stated by the tagger, no quotation): partial
controls[1]0.95the tagger's words
conceptsfrequency attenuation
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concepts[2]the paper's words
conceptsrepetition effects
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
concepts[3]0.95the paper's words
conceptsepisodic memory
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concepts[4]0.95the paper's words
conceptsepisodic trace
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
concepts[5]0.95the paper's words
conceptsepisodic effect
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
concepts[6]0.95the paper's words
sensesONE NAME, TWO COMPONENTS - AND THE THIRD RECORD TODAY TO MAKE THAT MOVE: `Quotation withheld.` tulving-schacter1990 splits priming into PRS and semantic memory; was2019 splits long-term semantic priming into strengthening and memory-for-operations; this splits the repetition effect into lexical and episodic. Three decades, three different pairs, and every one splits a term the field was using as if it named one thing. They are not the same distinction - each is drawn on the dimension its own experiments could separate - which is what makes the pattern worth more than any of them
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senses[0]0.95the tagger's words
sensesAND MASKING IS A DISSECTION INSTRUMENT HERE, NOT A WAY OF HIDING A STIMULUS: `the masking is assumed to minimize the influence of any possible episodic trace of the prime.` Every other masked-priming record in this corpus masks to make the prime UNREPORTABLE - dehaene1998, marcel1983, Finkbeiner2011, hesselmann2016, and all the argument about whether the subject saw it. Here masking SUBTRACTS A COMPONENT so the other can be measured alone, and the evidence that it worked is that frequency attenuation disappears. A reader who knows masked priming as an awareness paradigm will misread this design
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senses[1]0.95the tagger's words
sensesAND THE TARGET IS A CLASS OF MODEL, NAMED: `Quotation withheld.` The paper is not reporting an effect and looking for an explanation - it is reporting an effect that a specific published architecture cannot produce. A result aimed at a model is falsifiable in a way a result aimed at a phenomenon is not, and it is why this paper is still cited: the model it was aimed at is Forster's own
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
senses[2]0.95the tagger's words
sensesAND THE CLAIM IS ABOUT THE TASK, NOT THE FACULTY: `frequency attenuation is a product of the involvement of the episodic memory system in the lexical decision process.` Not that lexical access is episodic - that the lexical decision TASK recruits episodic memory, so a measure everyone treats as a window on the lexicon is partly a memory test. The same shape as the task-difficulty artifact and the associative-priming confound: the instrument is part of the phenomenon, and that is now four records this session saying so about four different measures
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senses[3]0.95the tagger's words
claim_relationsreplicates → Evett and Humphreys (1981)
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claim_relations[0]the tagger's words
claim_relationsbuilds-on → Oliphant (1983)
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claim_relations[1]the tagger's words
claim_relationsbuilds-on → Balota (1983)
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claim_relations[2]the tagger's words
concept_edgesepisodic memory —causes→ frequency attenuation
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
direction on the measure: increases · strength of the relation: 0.9 · note: 'is a product of' IS THE PAPER'S OWN VERB AND THE CLAIM IS ABOUT THE TASK. Episodic memory is recruited BY THE LEXICAL DECISION PROCESS, and that recruitment produces the frequency sensitivity. Weight 0.9: it is the abstract's stated hypothesis and the masking experiments are built to test it - remove the episodic trace and the attenuation goes. The direction is testable and was tested, which is why this is 0.9 rather than the 0.7 a bare attribution would get. Audit 2026-09-28: DOUBTFUL - read against its full span and kept, but 'The suggestion is made' that episodic memory produces frequency attenuation; hedged.
concept_edges[0]0.95the tagger's words
concept_edgesepisodic effect —part-of→ repetition effects
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
strength of the relation: 0.95 · note: THE COMPONENT STRUCTURE, AND 'part-of' IS EXACTLY RIGHT FOR ONCE. The quote says repetition effects CONSIST OF two components and names both with their frequency signatures. The episodic half is the one masking removes. I first ran this from 'episodic trace' at weight 0.9, discounting for the fact that the quote says 'episodic EFFECT' - and the guard refused it. The right answer was a second node, not a lower weight. 'episodic trace' is what is STORED and masking removes; 'episodic effect' is what is MEASURED and frequency modulates. The paper uses both for this half and never says they are the same. A WEIGHT CANNOT EXPRESS A TERM MISMATCH; A NODE CAN.
concept_edges[1]0.95the tagger's words
content_tagshypothesis-testing
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
about this quote: QUOTE RECOVERED FROM THE PAPER'S OWN CHARACTERS. The recorded quote was LETTERS-ONLY IDENTICAL to this stretch of the staged text but not an exact substring of it - spaces, hyphens, ligature glyphs or mathematical operators differed, so it could never anchor. This is the file's own text between the same two letters: not produced by a rule about the damage, copied out of the file. Round-trip checked (the recovered span is letters-only equal to the original) and length-checked. The text as originally recorded is kept in evidence as extracted.
content_tags.statistics[0]the tagger's words
content_tagsmean
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
about this quote: QUOTE RECOVERED FROM THE PAPER'S OWN CHARACTERS. The recorded quote was LETTERS-ONLY IDENTICAL to this stretch of the staged text but not an exact substring of it - spaces, hyphens, ligature glyphs or mathematical operators differed, so it could never anchor. This is the file's own text between the same two letters: not produced by a rule about the damage, copied out of the file. Round-trip checked (the recovered span is letters-only equal to the original) and length-checked. The text as originally recorded is kept in evidence as extracted.
also in: mean
content_tags.statistics[1]the tagger's words
content_tagsp-value
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
also in: p-value
content_tags.statistics[2]the tagger's words
content_tagsstandard-deviation
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
about this quote: QUOTE RECOVERED FROM THE PAPER'S OWN CHARACTERS. The recorded quote was LETTERS-ONLY IDENTICAL to this stretch of the staged text but not an exact substring of it - spaces, hyphens, ligature glyphs or mathematical operators differed, so it could never anchor. This is the file's own text between the same two letters: not produced by a rule about the damage, copied out of the file. Round-trip checked (the recovered span is letters-only equal to the original) and length-checked. The text as originally recorded is kept in evidence as extracted.
content_tags.statistics[3]the tagger's words
content_tagsstatistical-significance
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content_tags.statistics[4]the tagger's words
content_tagsvariance
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
about this quote: QUOTE RECOVERED FROM THE PAPER'S OWN CHARACTERS. The recorded quote was LETTERS-ONLY IDENTICAL to this stretch of the staged text but not an exact substring of it - spaces, hyphens, ligature glyphs or mathematical operators differed, so it could never anchor. This is the file's own text between the same two letters: not produced by a rule about the damage, copied out of the file. Round-trip checked (the recovered span is letters-only equal to the original) and length-checked. The text as originally recorded is kept in evidence as extracted.
also in: variance
content_tags.statistics[5]the tagger's words

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