Associative priming in color naming: interference and facilitation

• Published in: Memory & cognition Vol. 27; no. 3; pp. 454 - 464
• Main Author: Burt, Jennifer S.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Austin, TX Psychonomic Society 01.05.1999; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Adult; Analysis of Variance; Associative Processes; Biological and medical sciences; Cognition & reasoning; Color; Color Perception; Experiments; Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology; Humans; Interference; Language; Lexical Access; Miscellaneous; Models, Psychological; Priming; Psycholinguistics; Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry; Psychology. Psychophysiology; Psychomotor Performance - physiology; Reaction Time; Signal Detection, Psychological; Verbal Learning - physiology; Word Association Tests; Facilitation; Human; Language; Word frequency; Priming effect; Color; Interference; Associative relation; Cognition; Naming; Experimental study
• ISSN: 0090-502X; 1532-5946
• DOI: 10.3758/BF03211540

In Experiment 1, color-naming interference for target stimuli following associated primes was greater in a group making a lexical decision to the prime than in a group reading the prime silently. High-frequency targets were responded to more quickly than low-frequency targets. In Experiment 2, with subjects naming the prime, there was evidence of associative interference when the prime and the target were grouped temporally but not when the intertrial interval was comparable with the prime-target interval. Associative primes presented at a short (120-msec) prime-target stimulus onset asynchrony facilitated color naming in Experiment 3. Taken together, the results suggest that the effect of faster processing of the base word in a color-naming task is facilitatory and that color-naming priming interference arises when associative prime processing increases conflict between word and color responses by enhancing phonological or articulatory activation of the base word.