Day 88 of 150 Language Difficulty 5/10
Reading 'bread' speeds your decision about 'butter'
Quick answer
Reading 'bread' speeds your decision about 'butter'. Today's question (Semantic priming and lexical decision) asks about a finding from Meyer, D. E., & Schvaneveldt, R. W. in 1971. The correct option is A semantically related prime such as 'bread' — full explanation, primary source, and glossary cross-links below.
Today's question
In a lexical-decision task, participants are faster to confirm 'butter' is a word when it follows:
Reveal the answer and explanation
Correct: A — A semantically related prime such as 'bread'
Meyer and Schvaneveldt (1971) introduced the lexical-decision task and showed that responses to 'butter' are faster when preceded by 'bread' than by 'doctor' or an unrelated word — semantic priming. The effect generalizes to associative, taxonomic, and feature-based relations and is observed at very short prime–target intervals (a few hundred milliseconds), suggesting automatic spread of activation through a structured lexical–semantic network. Semantic priming is a workhorse paradigm for probing the organization of word knowledge in the mental lexicon and now has variants that dissociate purely associative from semantic-featural overlap.
About the source
Meyer, D. E., & Schvaneveldt, R. W. (1971). Facilitation in recognizing pairs of words: Evidence of a dependence between retrieval operations. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 90(2), 227–234.
Every Cognition Bible question cites a primary source — a paper, book chapter, or monograph that exists, that we can point to on Google Scholar, and whose finding the question accurately summarizes. No fabricated authority strings, no name-drops without paper-level grounding.
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