Repetition priming is not purely episodic in origin

Abstract

The sufficiency of similarity among surface attributes of prime-target pairs to account for the pattern of facilitation obtained in the repetition priming paradigm was evaluated. In Experiment 1, morphological primes were singular, inflected case forms of Serbo-Croatian words and visual similarity of prime and target was manipulated by alternating the two alphabets in which the Serbo-Croatian language is written. Results indicated that the magnitude of facilitation in the alphabetically alternating condition was not reduced relative to the nonalternating condition (RUPI-RUPI vs. RUPI-RUPI) which suggested that visual similarity is not a necessary condition for facilitation in the present task. In Experiment 2, related pairs included (a) base forms with diminutives, a class of highly productive and semantically predictable derivations marked in Serbo-Croatian by suffixes and (b) base words with morphologically unrelated monomorphemic words whose orthographic pattern encompassed the target in initial position and a sequence of letters in final position that elsewhere functions as a diminutive suffix. No facilitation of word targets by orthographically similar but morphologically unrelated primes was observed although there was a tendency toward facilitation among structurally similar pseudowords. Collectively, the experiments suggested that structural similarity of prime and target is not a sufficient condition for facilitation in the repetition priming paradigm.