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Abstract This paper examines the consequences that codes activated during reading have on activities unrelated to reading by investigating the effects of semantics on temporal order judgments. Participants judged which of two word targets appeared first. Targets appeared either synchronously, or were separated by varying stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs). For one group of participants, one target on each trial was related to a prime word shown at the beginning of the trial. This priming relation affected temporal order judgments such that participants sometimes reported related targets as having appeared first, even when they appeared second. It is suggested that this effect is best explained as showing that codes activated during word recognition affect the attentional selection aspects of the temporal order judgment task.
Reading is a skill that has been studied extensively by cognitive psychologists. A major vein of reading research has concentrated on how skilled readers compute meaning from print. This work has led to the development of various models of word recognition and reading processes (e.g., Coltheart, Curtis, Atkins, & Haller, 1993; Grainger & Jacobs, 1996; ;McNamara, 1992; Plaut, McClelland, Seidenberg, & Patterson, 1996; Seidenberg & McClelland, 1989; see also Carr & Pollatse, 1985).
One of the major vehicles that has been used to study the computation of meaning during word recognition si the semantic priming paradigm. Briefly, a target word is preceded by a prime word, which is sometimes associated in meaning to the target word, and reaction time (e.g., naming or lexical-decision latencies) to the target word is measured. The general finding is that participants are faster and more accurate to respond to a target word when it is preceded by a related prime, than when preceded by an unrelated prime (e.g., Meyer & Schvaneveldt, 1971). The work on semantic priming has led to the development of several theories of how word meaning is computed in the process of word recognition (see Neely, 1991 for a review of various experiments and theories).
One process common to many theories of semantic priming is activation. Briefly, according to this view, memory is organized as a set of nodes, with related concepts sharing links.1 When a word is presented to a reader, the node representing that concept becomes activated. Shortly thereafter, activation spreads...