Abstract
Depth of processing of printed words was investigated by comparing priming effects in a task in which subjects made lexical decisions for both the prime and the target with priming effects in a task in which the subjects made “case” decisions for the prime (i.e., decided whether it was written in lower- or uppercase) and lexical decisions on the targets. Thirty-two target words were preceded either by semantic associates or by unrelated words. For both “case” and “lexical decision” conditions for the prime, equal facilitation was found for related targets, suggesting that subjects analyzed words at a semantic level even while making “case” decisions. These results question the applicability of a level-of-processing model for word recognition processes.
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Portions of this study were presented at the 24th annual meeting of the Psychonomic Society, San Diego, CA, November 1983. S. Bentin is with the Aranne Laboratory of Human Psychophysiology at the Hadassah Medical Center. L. Katz is with the Department of Psychology at the University of Connecticut at Storrs.
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Bentin, S., Katz, L. Semantic awareness in a nonlexical task. Bull. Psychon. Soc. 22, 381–384 (1984). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03333851
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03333851