Does LGHT prime DARK? Masked associative priming with addition neighbors.

We present two masked priming lexical decision experiments in which we examined whether a nonword prime word would activate associative/semantic information from its corresponding addition neighbor (e.g., lght-dark via the addition neighbor light), producing associative/semantic priming. The rationale was the following: If a nonword prime with a missing letter produced a semantic/associative priming effect, this would clearly indicate that this nonword was activating the lexical/semantic representations of its base word, thereby reinforcing the models of visual-word recognition in which the orthographic representations produced by lght (or ligt) and light are quite similar (e.g., SOLAR, SERIOL, open-bigram, and overlap models). The results showed that the magnitude of the masked associative priming effect with subset primes was remarkably similar to that of the priming effect with the corresponding word prime. Furthermore, the magnitude of the associative priming effect was similar when the deleted letter was a vowel and when the deleted letter was a consonant.