Word recognition and temporal order judgments: semantics turns back the clock.

This paper examines the consequences that codes activated during reading have on activities unrelated to reading by investigating the effects of semantics on temporal order judgments. Participants judged which of two word targets appeared first. Targets appeared either synchronously, or were separated by varying stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs). For one group of participants, one target on each trial was related to a prime word shown at the beginning of the trial. This priming relation affected temporal order judgments such that participants sometimes reported related targets as having appeared first, even when they appeared second. It is suggested that this effect is best explained as showing that codes activated during word recognition affect the attentional selection aspects of the temporal order judgment task.