Three-step priming in lexical decision.

In two experiments, we investigated mediated two-step priming (e.g., from LION to STRIPES via TIGER) and three-step priming (e.g., from MANE to STRIPES via LION and TIGER). Experiment 1 showed robust two-step priming in the double lexical decision task. In Experiment 2, we tested for three-step priming and investigated the possibility that it is not association strength based on free association, but frequency of co-occurrence, that causes three-step priming. Co-occurrence has been proposed as a measure of familiarity and semantic relatedness. Significant three-step priming was obtained. Lexical co-occurrence could not account for the effect. However, a more global measure of semantic similarity that includes the similarity of the contexts in which concepts occur revealed that the three-step pairs were semantically related. If this global measure provides a proper estimate of the semantic relatedness of our items, then three-step priming is consistent not only with spreading activation models, but also with distributed memory models and the compound cue model.