Explain What Can Priming Experiments Tell Us About The Way In Which Words Are Organised?

1. What can priming experiments tell us about the way in which words are organised in the mental lexicon? Provide examples of priming effects.

The mental lexicon refers to “the human word-store” (Aitchison 2003,10), where words and their corresponding meanings are stored ready for us to access and use in our daily lives. The mental lexicon grows as we learn new words, and it is accessed every time we communicate, whether that be in the spoken mode or the written mode. A huge question that is asked by psycholinguists is: ‘how is the mental lexicon organised?’, and looking at Priming Experiments can help us to determine the answer to this question.

Priming experiments are frequently used to find out more about the mental lexicon, in particular the

If the word shown on screen is in some way related to the previous word, for example if the previous word is

He played a sentence to his participants, which contained an ambiguous word, such as ‘liver’ (which could refer to the organ, or someone who is living), and then flashed up a word on the screen that made it clear which meaning was meant in the sentence. He found that even though the word flashed up on screen determined which meaning was meant, words relating to both meanings were still primed, for example ‘organs’ and ‘alive’ . This shows that both meanings of the word were activated. (Swinney, D.A 1979:645-659) From this, psycholinguists can see that perhaps ambiguous words are stored as one in our mental lexicon. For example the word “watch” would be stored as one word, however both the noun and the verb meaning will be stored underneath, hence why all meanings of ambiguous words are activated. . (Altmann, G