Revisiting novel word semantic priming:The role of strategic priming mechanisms

Although it has been proposed that new words are encoded in a qualitatively different way from established words—in episodic rather than semantic memory—such accounts are challenged by the finding that newly learnt words influence the processing of well-known words in semantic priming tasks. In this article, we explore whether this apparent contradiction is due to differences in task design. Specifically, we hypothesised that a large stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) would allow the participant to engage strategic retrieval and priming mechanisms to facilitate the recognition of a semantically related word, compared with a shorter SOA, which promotes more automatic processing. In Experiment 1, 60 participants learned 34 novel words and their meanings that later served as primes for related/unrelated existing word targets in a primed lexical decision task, with a 450 ms SOA. There was no significant priming effect. In Experiment 2, we increased the SOA to 1,000 ms, and found a significant priming effect with novel words. Finally, there was no significant priming effect with novel words in Experiment 3 that used a 200 ms SOA. A semantic priming effect with familiar words was found in Experiments 1 and 3, but not Experiment 2 (the longest SOA). We interpret these results as providing evidence for the idea that new and existing words are represented differently, with the former encoded outside of conventional language networks as they appear to rely predominantly on slow (strategic) mechanisms to prime related, existing words.