| P · prime | a semantically associated context word (the first word of a pair) |
| T · target | a letter string to classify as a word (lexical decision) |
| B · baseline | recognition time for unassociated word pairs |
| E · priming effect | faster word recognition when the pair is associated |
| A · association | congruent (positive) |
phenomenon · claim-type · cross-domain-transfer · mechanism · claim-relation · replication-status · limitation — grounded in the full text| phenomenon | associative priming in lexical decision— “The results of Exp, I suggest that degree of association is a powerful factor affecting lexical decisions in the yes-no task” | |
| claim-type | mechanism— “The results of both experiments support a retrieval model involving a dependence between separate successive decisions about whether each of the two strings is a word” | |
| method — evidence | — “Two experiments are reported in which 5s were presented two strings of letters simultaneously, with one string displayed visually above the other” | |
| contradicts | Schaeffer and Wallace (1969, 1970)— “Our reasoning suggests, furthermore, that the findings of Schaeffer and Wallace (1969, 1970) may not have resulted solely from a comparison of word meanings” | claim_relations[0] |
| builds-on | Meyer (1971)— “Recently, Meyer (1971) has collected data in other tasks that are consistent with this notion” | claim_relations[1] |
| sense | THE FIRST MEASUREMENT OF THE EFFECT, WITH ITS ERROR BAR: `"Yes" responses averaged 85 ± 19 msec, faster for pairs of ASSOCIATED words than for pairs of UNASSOCIATED words, F (1, 11) = 20.6, p < .001.` Two strings shown at once, one above the other, decide whether both are words. There is no prime and no target - the design is simultaneous and symmetric, which is worth holding onto, because everything downstream assumes a sequence and an asymmetry that this experiment did not have— “"Yes" responses averaged 85 ± 19 msec, faster for pairs of associated words than for pairs of unassociated words, F (1, 11) = 20.6, p < .001” | senses[0] |
| sense | AND THE PAPER DECLINES THE INFERENCE ITS OWN NAME WOULD LATER REST ON: `The effect of association on RT does not necessarily imply that the meaning of a word is retrieved to make a lexical decision.` The founding result of semantic priming, and its authors say in the discussion that it does not establish semantic retrieval. The word `semantic` in `semantic priming` is a claim this sentence explicitly withholds - and the withholding is not hedging, it is followed by a worked alternative in which association affects RT through the organisation of memory locations rather than through meaning— “The effect of association on RT does not necessarily imply that the meaning of a word is retrieved to make a lexical decision” | senses[1] |
| sense | TWO MECHANISMS, NO TEST, AND THE PAPER SAYS SO RATHER THAN PICKING: `The present data do not provide a direct test between this location-shifting model and the spreading-excitation model.` It then does something better than choosing - it asks what survives the choice: `Regardless of whether spreading excitation, location shifting, comparison of meanings, or some other process is involved, the effects of association appear limited neither to semantic decisions nor to same-different judgments.` The result is stated at the level the data supports and the mechanism is left open, which is exactly what neely1977 spends 28 pages building an experiment to settle six years later— “Regardless of whether spreading excitation, location shifting, comparison of meanings, or some other process is involved, the effects of association appear limited neither to semantic decisions nor to same-different judgments” | senses[2] |
| sense | AND THE LIMITATION IS STATED IN ONE FLAT SENTENCE WITH NO SOFTENING: `At present we do not have ways to test all the possible explanations of these effects.` No `future work will`, no `it remains to be seen`. This corpus has 539 records and I have read few limitation sentences this short - and it belongs to the paper that started the literature, which is the opposite of the order one would expect confidence to arrive in— “At present we do not have ways to test all the possible explanations of these effects” | senses[3] |
| control | half of the practice and test trials required a 'yes' response — held — rules out that a reaction-time difference is a response bias - subjects favouring one key because it is used more often— “Half of the practice trials and test trials therefore required "yes" responses.” | controls[0] |
| control | each subject was randomly assigned one of the lists in one of the orders, so that every list-order combination was used exactly once — held — rules out that the effect depends on a particular list or a particular presentation order— “Each S was then randomly assigned one of the lists presented in one of the orders, so that each list in each order was used for exactly one 5.” | controls[1] |
| audit | spreading excitation —distinct-from→ location shifting — Audit 2026-09-28: DOUBTFUL - read against its full span and kept, but the span lists spreading excitation and location shifting as alternative processes; distinct-from is loose.— “Regardless of whether spreading excitation, location shifting, comparison of meanings, or some other process is involved, the effects of association appear limited neither to semantic decisions nor to same-different judgments” | concept_edges[1] |
| note | spreading excitation —distinct-from→ location shifting — THE EDGE IS CARRIED BY A LIST, WHICH IS WHY IT IS 0.85 AND NOT HIGHER. The sentence that draws the contrast explicitly - 'the present data…' - writes both names hyphenated, and the concept nodes are the unhyphenated forms. So the triple is built from the sentence that lists them as alternatives instead. Distinctness is genuinely asserted there - 'regardless of whether X, Y, Z, or some other process' only makes sense if they are different processes - but it is asserted in passing, on the way to saying the effect survives the question. The stronger sentence exists; a hyphen keeps it out, exactly as a plural kept the logogen edge out of neely1977 an hour ago. Two edges lost to orthography in one evening is worth recording as a pattern rather than as two accidents.— “Regardless of whether spreading excitation, location shifting, comparison of meanings, or some other process is involved, the effects of association appear limited neither to semantic decisions nor to same-different judgments” | concept_edges[1] |
| weight | spreading excitation —distinct-from→ location shifting — 0.85— “Regardless of whether spreading excitation, location shifting, comparison of meanings, or some other process is involved, the effects of association appear limited neither to semantic decisions nor to same-different judgments” | concept_edges[1] |
| outcome (stated by the tagger, no quotation) | control — held | controls[0] |
| outcome (stated by the tagger, no quotation) | control — held | controls[1] |
| replication | untested | |
| limitation | The data cannot decide between the spreading-excitation and location-shifting accounts of the dependence.— “The present data do not provide a direct test between this location-shifting model and the spreading-excitation model” | limitations[0] |
| limitation | The authors have no way to test all candidate explanations of the association effect.— “At present we do not have ways to test all the possible explanations of these effects” | limitations[1] |
| limitation | Experiment II's reaction times cannot directly test the serial-decision model.— “The RTs from the same-different task do not provide direct evidence for testing the proposed serial-decision model because both lexical decisions are assumed to be made before all same-different responses” | limitations[2] |
finding · quantity · variable · definition · key-term — grounded in the full text| finding | semantic priming: associated word pairs are recognized faster than unassociated pairs— “"Yes" responses averaged 85 ± 19 msec, faster for pairs of associated words than for pairs of unassociated words, F” | content_tags.findings[0] |
| finding | the association effect is consistent and sizeable across subjects | content_tags.findings[1] |
| variable | association (manipulated independent variable) | content_tags.variables[0] |
| key-terms | lexical decision, associated words, unassociated words, word recognition, retrieval, facilitation |
| concept | lexical decision | concepts[2] |
| concept | association — not defined in this paper's own words; the manipulated variable - 'degree of association', taken from free-association norms, not from any theory of meaning. That is deliberate and it is why the caveat later in the paper is available to be made: an associative norm is a fact about what people say, and nothing about it requires that meaning was retrieved | concepts[3] |
| concept | dependence — not defined in this paper's own words; the paper's actual thesis, and the word in its title: the two word/nonword decisions are not independent. Recognising one string changes what happens when the other is recognised. Note how much weaker and how much more defensible this is than 'meaning spreads' - it claims only that the operations interact Quotation withheld — this paper is not ours to reproduce, and the page has already quoted as much of it as the rights layer allows. The tag, its field and its confidence stand; the sentence is at the publisher. | concepts[4] |
| concept | spreading excitation — not defined in this paper's own words; candidate one: `retrieving information from a particular memory location produces a passive "spread of excitation" to other nearby locations`. Credited here to Collins & Quillian 1970 and offered as one possibility among several - this corpus merged collins1975 today, the paper that made it the standard account Quotation withheld — this paper is not ours to reproduce, and the page has already quoted as much of it as the rights layer allows. The tag, its field and its confidence stand; the sentence is at the publisher. | concepts[5] |
| concept | location shifting — not defined in this paper's own words; candidate two, and the reason the paper will not choose: memory as a tape or disk where `time is required to "shift" readout from one location to another`. It explains one result spreading excitation struggles with - that `different` responses were faster when a word sat above a nonword - so it is not a straw alternative Quotation withheld — this paper is not ours to reproduce, and the page has already quoted as much of it as the rights layer allows. The tag, its field and its confidence stand; the sentence is at the publisher. | concepts[6] |
| ANOVA F | as written: F (1, 11) Quotation withheld — this paper is not ours to reproduce, and the page has already quoted as much of it as the rights layer allows. The tag, its field and its confidence stand; the sentence is at the publisher. | content_tags.statistics[0] |
| evidence status note | ANOVA — 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] |
| p-value p | as written: p < .001 Quotation withheld — this paper is not ours to reproduce, and the page has already quoted as much of it as the rights layer allows. The tag, its field and its confidence stand; the sentence is at the publisher. | content_tags.statistics[1] |
| evidence status note | p-value — 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[1] |
| standard-error SE | as written: standard errors Quotation withheld — this paper is not ours to reproduce, and the page has already quoted as much of it as the rights layer allows. The tag, its field and its confidence stand; the sentence is at the publisher. | content_tags.statistics[2] |
| evidence status note | standard-error — 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[2] |
| statistical-significance | as written: significantly Quotation withheld — this paper is not ours to reproduce, and the page has already quoted as much of it as the rights layer allows. The tag, its field and its confidence stand; the sentence is at the publisher. | content_tags.statistics[3] |
| evidence status note | statistical-significance — 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] |
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.
Tag layer © the Meta-Tagging Project, CC BY 4.0. The paper text is © its authors/publisher
and is linked, not reproduced. Excerpts shown are short quotations for identification and verification.
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