Is semantic priming due to association strength or feature overlap? A microanalytic review

Hutchison · Psychonomic Bulletin & Review · 2003 · cognitive-psychology · 10.3758/bf03196544 · record hutchison2003-is-semantic-priming-due-to-associa
tag layer · index · concepts · authors · עברית
Where this record's text came from. faceted 2026-08 by reading the locally held text (pdftext); every evidence string verified as an exact substring of that text before merging. Claim type: the shape is genuinely double. The abstract's headline is a mechanism claim (priming is caused by both association strength and feature overlap), but the vehicle is a sustained critique of Lucas's (2000) meta-analysis and of individual studies' methods; 'mechanism' was chosen because the quoted headline conclusion is about what causes priming. Replication status is 'contested' because the paper's central claim about pure associative priming is the direct opposite of Lucas's (2000) published conclusion, and the paper itself documents repeated failures to replicate episodic priming (Carroll & Kirsner, Neely & Durgunoglu) alongside consistent replications of mediated priming. Three Lucas relations are recorded because the paper both leans on and reverses that meta-analysis; the many other citations are bare and are not recorded as relations. 2026-08-19, 2026-08-25 and 2026-08-26 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.
This record’s own method is review, and the tags below follow from that. A review’s findings, quantities and statistics are things stated IN this paper, and some of them report results obtained elsewhere. No tag on this page names a different author. Measured across every review in this corpus, 81% of a review’s tags carry no citation at all — most of them are the review speaking. The corpus does not adjudicate the rest: read an unmarked tag as a claim this paper makes, not necessarily one it made first.
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.

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, all 7 are grounded in a quoted sentence. All carry the tagger's gloss of what the term means in this paper, which is not something the article can license.
association strength feature overlap automatic priming mediated associates semantic matching stimulus onset asynchrony semantic similarity Activation spreads from the prime's concept along indirect links to concepts it is not directly associated with, producing mediated priming. Participants notice that related pairs predict word targets and check back from target to prime, so relatedness biases the lexical decision after the target has been accessed. An auditory prime leaves an echoic trace that survives into target presentation, letting participants integrate or strategically match prime and target and so inflating auditory priming effects. In distributed recurrent networks a featurally similar prime leaves the network nearer the target's attractor basin, so it settles into the target pattern in fewer iterations. semantic priming effect automatic expectancy generation instrument relations script relations attractor basins semantic distance Hyperspace Analogue to Language (HAL) priming effect RP presentation modality association strengths type of task SOA t-test effect size unweighted effect sizes ... Cohen’s d mean p-value review

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
mechanismmechanismshow the reported effect is said to come about
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/10.3758/bf03196544. The reading view exists for the papers whose licence permits it.

Every tag on this page

claim_relations 3 · claim_type 1 · concept_edges 3 · concepts 7 · content_tags 38 · controls 1 · limitations 5 · mechanisms 4 · method 1 · phenomenon 1 · senses 6

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 3 relations here carry that mark. The rest are the tagger’s reading of the sentence quoted beside them.

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
phenomenonsemantic priming
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
phenomenonthe paper's words
methodreview
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
also in: review
methodthe paper's words
mechanismsmechanisms
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
mechanisms[0]the tagger's words
mechanismsmechanisms
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
mechanisms[1]the tagger's words
mechanismsmechanisms
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
mechanisms[2]the tagger's words
mechanismsmechanisms
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
mechanisms[3]the tagger's words
limitationsThe status of several relation types (collocates, episodic relatives, script relations) is left unresolved and needs further experiments.
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
limitations[0]the tagger's words
limitationsRestricting the review to published studies leaves the direction of the resulting bias in effect-size estimates unknown.
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
limitations[1]the tagger's words
limitationsThe review cannot say why auditory presentation yields so much larger priming estimates than visual presentation.
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
limitations[2]the tagger's words
limitationsThe available evidence cannot decide whether the associative boost reflects combined lexical and semantic connections or simply greater featural overlap.
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
limitations[3]the tagger's words
limitationsTHE NORMS THE WHOLE LITERATURE RESTS ON ARE CONCEDED NOT TO BE WHAT THEY ARE TAKEN FOR: 'Quotation withheld' This is the review's own instrument being withdrawn mid-argument, and it is what licenses a senses row's verdict on a whole class of studies.
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
limitations[4]1.0the tagger's words
controlsevery target was counterbalanced BOTH ACROSS AND WITHIN subjects so that each appeared in the related, unrelated and neutral conditions
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
eliminates: that a priming effect is an item effect - that the related and unrelated sets simply contain different words · outcome (stated by the tagger, no quotation): held
controls[0]0.95the tagger's words
conceptsassociation strength
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
concepts[0]0.95the paper's words
conceptsfeature overlap
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
concepts[1]0.95the paper's words
conceptsautomatic priming
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
concepts[2]0.95the paper's words
conceptsmediated associates
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
conceptssemantic matching
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
concepts[4]0.95the paper's words
conceptsstimulus onset asynchrony
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
concepts[5]1.0the paper's words
conceptssemantic similarity
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
concepts[6]1.0the paper's words
sensesTHE ANSWER IS BOTH, AND IT IS NOT A COMPROMISE - IT IS A PARTITION BY STIMULUS CLASS. `Quotation withheld` Then the split: `Quotation withheld` Different stimulus classes, different mechanisms, one label over all of them - which is precisely the condition under which a controlled vocabulary stops being informative
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
senses[0]0.95the tagger's words
sensesAND IT CATCHES A CLAIM CHANGING MEANING ALONG A CITATION CHAIN, BY HAND. Lucas (2000) cited Hodgson (1991), who cites Neely (1991), for the claim that priming is smaller in pronunciation than in lexical decision. `Quotation withheld such as Cohen's d.` A claim about milliseconds became a claim about effect sizes in two citations, and the meta-analysis built on it. This is the failure the concept-record design exists to make visible, found here by one person reading a chain backwards
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
senses[1]0.95the tagger's words
sensesTHE VERDICT ON A WHOLE CLASS OF STUDIES, STATED WITHOUT SOFTENING: `Quotation withheld` The reason is the confound: associated words tend also to be similar words, so varying association alone varies both. Not `limited`, not `to be interpreted with caution`. A review willing to write that sentence about its own field's standard design is rare enough to be worth the tag on its 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
senses`dominance` and `association strength` - REPORTED AS INTERCHANGEABLE IN THE LITERATURE, with a citation: `the terms dominance and association strength have been used interchangeably (Lorch, 1982)`. Two measures that a paper arguing about WHICH ONE DRIVES PRIMING needs kept apart.
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
senses[3]0.95the tagger's words
senses`similar` - THE MEASURED QUANTITY DEPENDS ON HOW THE EXPERIMENTER DEFINED THE WORD TO THE PARTICIPANT, AND THE PAPER LISTS THAT AS ONE OF FIVE SOURCES OF VARIANCE: `there is no universal method for determining similarity in this task`, and ratings vary on (1) the other words in the norming set, (2) HOW THE RESEARCHER DEFINES SIMILAR FOR THE PARTICIPANTS, (3) presentation order, (4) instructional set, (5) association between the items. THE DEFINITION IS NOT UPSTREAM OF THE MEASUREMENT HERE - IT IS ONE OF ITS INPUTS, named alongside stimulus order.
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
senses[4]1.0the tagger's words
sensesthe CONSCIOUS/UNCONSCIOUS boundary - A THEORETICAL DISTINCTION WITH NO UNIVERSAL OPERATIONAL VALUE: `there is no universal SOA that distinctly separates conscious from unconscious processing, and the SOA necessary to demonstrate automatic priming may vary from task to task`. A THRESHOLD DISPUTE, not a naming one - the two categories are not in doubt and the number that divides them is, so no nomenclature body can repair it.
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
senses[5]1.0the tagger's words
claim_relationscontradicts → Lucas (2000)
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
claim_relations[0]the tagger's words
claim_relationscontradicts → Lucas (2000)
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
claim_relations[1]the tagger's words
claim_relationsbuilds-on → Lucas (2000)
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
claim_relations[2]the tagger's words
concept_edgesassociation strength —causes→ automatic priming
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: 0.95 · direction on the measure (stated by the tagger, no quotation): increases · note: HALF OF A CONCLUSION SENTENCE, AND THE OTHER HALF IS THE NEXT EDGE. The span names all three endpoints, so two triples come out of one quote and the note has to say which half each is carrying or a reader gets a partial claim as if it were the whole one. Weight 0.95: it is the review's stated conclusion, both endpoints are named, and 'due to' is unambiguous. The 'both' is the finding - either edge alone reproduces exactly the one-sided reading this paper was written to correct.
concept_edges[0]0.95the tagger's words
concept_edgesfeature overlap —causes→ automatic priming
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: 0.95 · direction on the measure (stated by the tagger, no quotation): increases · note: The other half. Lucas's (2000) meta-analysis concluded feature overlap was the WHOLE story - 'implies that semantic…' - and this review keeps the mechanism while removing the 'primarily'. A finding preserved and a quantifier withdrawn, which is a shape the schema records only in prose.
concept_edges[1]0.95the tagger's words
concept_edgesassociation strength —distinct-from→ feature overlap
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
strength of the relation: 0.9 · note: THE EDGE IS A CONFOUND, WHICH IS A STRANGE THING TO BE ABLE TO SAY. 'The second problem…' They are distinct - the whole review depends on that - and in ordinary stimuli they travel together, because words people associate tend also to be words that resemble each other. Weight 0.9 rather than 0.95: the span asserts the distinction only by asserting the difficulty of drawing it. That is real evidence of distinctness and it is weaker than a sentence saying so directly. Audit 2026-09-28: DOUBTFUL - read against its full span and kept, but the span notes the DIFFICULTY of separating the two; distinct-from is loose.
concept_edges[2]0.95the tagger's words
content_tagst-test
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
also in: t-test
content_tags.statistics[0]the tagger's words
content_tagseffect size
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
also in: effect size
content_tags.statistics[1]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.
also in: mean
content_tags.statistics[2]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[3]the tagger's words
content_tagsAutomatic semantic priming is produced by both association strength and feature overlap, not by either alone.
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
content_tags.findings[0]the tagger's words
content_tagsMediated associates (e.g. lion-stripes) give the strongest evidence for automatic purely associative priming, while functional associates, synonyms and antonyms instead support priming based on feature overlap.
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
content_tags.findings[1]the tagger's words
content_tagsCategory coordinates and perceptually similar items show no automatic priming when the stimuli are presented visually.
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
content_tags.findings[2]the tagger's words
content_tagsCategory coordinates produced only 4 ms of priming in the pronunciation task.
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
content_tags.findings[3]the tagger's words
content_tagsIn the standard lexical decision task at long SOA, backward priming (28 ms) was comparable to forward priming (34 ms), and statistically equivalent in every experiment.
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
content_tags.findings[4]the tagger's words
content_tagsMediated priming is strongest when strategic processing is minimised and disappears when it is encouraged.
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
content_tags.findings[5]the tagger's words
content_tagsLSA similarity of Balota and Lorch's mediated pairs (.20) was significantly higher than when the items were randomly re-paired (.10).
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
content_tags.findings[6]the tagger's words
content_tagsAuditory-presentation studies gave more than twice the effect size of visual ones (d = .51 vs .25).
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
content_tags.findings[7]the tagger's words
content_tagsPublished studies averaged an effect size of .35, almost twice the .18 of unpublished studies.
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
content_tags.findings[8]the tagger's words
content_tagsContrary to Lucas's claim, close inspection of her studies shows that priming from category coordinates is not automatic.
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
content_tags.findings[9]the tagger's words
content_tagssemantic priming effect
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
content_tags.definitions[0]the tagger's words
content_tagsautomatic
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
also in: automatic
content_tags.definitions[1]the tagger's words
content_tagsassociation strength
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
content_tags.definitions[2]the tagger's words
content_tagsexpectancy generation
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
content_tags.definitions[3]the tagger's words
content_tagsinstrument relations
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
content_tags.definitions[5]the tagger's words
content_tagsscript relations
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
content_tags.definitions[6]the tagger's words
content_tagsattractor basins
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
content_tags.definitions[7]the tagger's words
content_tagssemantic distance
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
content_tags.definitions[8]the tagger's words
content_tagsHyperspace Analogue to Language (HAL)
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
content_tags.definitions[9]the tagger's words
content_tagspriming effect
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
content_tags.variables[0]the tagger's words
content_tagsRP
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
also in: RP
content_tags.variables[1]the tagger's words
content_tagspresentation modality
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
content_tags.variables[3]the tagger's words
content_tagsassociation strengths
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
content_tags.variables[4]the tagger's words
content_tagstype of task
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
also in: type of task
content_tags.variables[5]the tagger's words
content_tagsSOA
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
also in: SOA
content_tags.variables[6]the tagger's words
content_tags31 msec — average priming from category coordinates across studies using the standard lexical decision task
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
content_tags.quantities[0]the tagger's words
content_tags4 msec — average priming from the same category-coordinate items in the pronunciation task
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
content_tags.quantities[1]the tagger's words
content_tagst(47) 5 4.27, p , .001 — test comparing LSA similarity of mediated pairs (.20) with randomly re-paired controls (.10)
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
content_tags.quantities[2]the tagger's words
content_tags.51 — mean Cohen's d for the five auditory-presentation studies, against .25 for the visual ones
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
content_tags.quantities[3]the tagger's words
content_tags.35 — unweighted mean effect size of published studies, against .18 for unpublished ones
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
content_tags.quantities[4]the tagger's words
content_tags26 studies (accounting for 116 experiments) — size of the Lucas (2000) meta-analysis that this review re-examines
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
content_tags.quantities[5]the tagger's words
content_tagsover 6,000 participants — norming sample behind the Nelson et al. (1999) association norms used to recheck every study's stimuli
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
content_tags.quantities[6]the tagger's words
content_tags160 million words — size of the Usenet corpus from which HAL builds its co-occurrence matrix
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
content_tags.quantities[7]the tagger's words
content_tags14 — number of association types into which the author classified each Palermo-Jenkins norm pair, showing association norms are heterogeneous
Quotation withheld — this record is not cleared for redistribution. The sentence is in the paper at the link above.
content_tags.quantities[8]the tagger's words

Interpretive choices

Tags that could not be placed in the text:

What was deliberately not tagged, and why, is recorded per paper by the tagger. Where a paper has no such record, this page says so rather than implying that nothing was declined.

© 2026 Shir Sivroni · ORCID 0009-0000-2597-2824