Partial awareness creates the "Illusion" of subliminal semantic priming
Article Abstract:
We argue that the lack of consensus regarding the existence of subliminal semantic processing arises from not taking into account the fact that linguistic stimuli are represented across several processing levels (features, letters, word form) that can independently reach or not reach awareness. Using masked words, we constructed conditions in which participants were aware of some letters or fragments of a word, while remaining unaware of the whole word. Three experiments using the Stroop priming paradigm show that when the stimulus set is reduced and participants are encouraged to guess the identity of the prime, such partially perceived stimuli can nonetheless give rise to "semantic" processing. We provide evidence that this effect is due to illusory reconstruction of the incompletely perceived stimulus, followed by usual semantic processing of the result. We conclude that previously reported unconscious Stroop priming is in fact a conscious effect, but applied to a perceptual illusion.
Publication Name: Psychological Science
Subject: Psychology and mental health
ISSN: 0956-7976
Year: 2004
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Grammatical gender is on the top of Italian tongues
Article Abstract:
Research of the Italian language suggests the existence of a lexical stage in word production that is separate from the conceptual correlates of syntactic elements and sound structure and which includes syntax. Syntactic word features are available to people in a positive tip-of-the-tongue state, but they are unable to generate a pronunciation code for those words. Access must be available to sound structure, syntax and lexical semantics for words to be correctly produced.
Publication Name: Psychological Science
Subject: Psychology and mental health
ISSN: 0956-7976
Year: 1997
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Subliminal visual priming
Article Abstract:
The role of subliminal visual priming in object identification was investigated. Masked pictures of objects were flashed briefly to 37 subjects and the positions of half of the objects were changed to test translation invariance. Empirical results showed that subliminal visual priming is not affected by intervening stimuli but impaired by translation. It was also found that subliminal visual priming has a longer duration than subliminal semantic priming.
Publication Name: Psychological Science
Subject: Psychology and mental health
ISSN: 0956-7976
Year: 1998
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