In this design, each word in turn should facilitate a neighbor or the body of a prime, just as the non-word “yeal” turns on the phonological verses connected with “year”, “meal”, “deal” compared to low non word “hile” which facilities the activation of “hire” alone. These lexical neighbors are evidently expected to be activated partially. In the same sense a high body frequency word would be Fear – (ear) which facilitates more words as opposed to Desk – (esk) a low body frequency word and as a result these primed body should partially activate other bodies. Thus the measure in this experiment is reaction time to a non-word and a word. In order for one to process whether a word is a word or a non-word, the word must reach an activation threshold. E.g. Cat vs. Lat – activation level for Lat will not reach the activation threshold as it isn’t a word thus we can conclude it’s a non-word. Accordingly a non-word would ultimately take longer to rule as a non-word than would concluding whether a word is a word.
In the following experiment, words are presented in lower case letters in the centre of the screen for 10 seconds each. In the study phase, participants were presented with 75 words which were presented in lower case at the center of the screen for 12 seconds each. Participants were then instructed to judge the pleasantness of each word presented on a scale of 1: least pleasant and 7: most pleasant. Analysis should show that retrieval cue types provided in this priming task should have an effect on the magnitude of priming.
Participants then engage in a distractor task in which they were asked to list the planets in order from smallest to largest. This is the retention interval task, which has no relation to the study at hand. In the test phase, participants were presented with 15 neighborhood high frequency words e.g. “shake” and non-words e.g. “shart”, 15 neighborhood low frequency words e.g. “snake” and non-words e.g. “slart” and 15 high body frequency words e.g. “track” and non-words e.g. “chend” and 15 low body frequency words e.g. “thumb” and non-words e.g. “thal”. The participants then commenced the task of deciphering whether a word is a non-word or a word. They did this by pressing the key “z” if it was a word and “l” if it was a non-word.
The effect of whether body frequency modulates the magnitude of priming and not neighborhood size was measured by reaction time – this showing a basic priming