Abstract

HOLDERBAUM, Candice Steffen  and  SALLES, Jerusa Fumagalli de. Semantic priming in children: effects of prime-target association strength and target frequency. Aletheia [online]. 2010, n.33, pp. 95-108. ISSN 1413-0394.

The semantic priming effect (SPE) can be understood as an improvement in performance derived from the context, in which a target processing is facilitated by the preceding stimulus (prime) because of a semantic association between them. This study aimed to verify if the association strength between prime and target and the frequency of the target is related to semantic priming effects found in third graders. For that, tests of correlations were done among these variables. Data demonstrated negative correlation between frequency of the target and variables reaction time and error percentage. Besides, it was also found a weak negative correlation between these variables and the association strength. These findings bring implications to the construction and interpretation of tasks and experiments that evaluate cognition with linguistic stimuli. Moreover, they demonstrate the need to control or manipulate some psycholinguistic variables of the stimuli in order to improve the quality of the experiments.

Keywords : Semantic priming; Association strength; Frequency.