Explain what kind of word pair was included in this experiment and how it's different than the kinds of word pairs we used in our own experiment earlier.
Hopefully now you are quite familiar with how a typical priming experiment works and what the "priming effect" is.
Remember that a priming experiment is always about comparing how people process targets that had a related prime, versus how people process targets that had an unrelated prime.
But did you know there are lots of different ways words can be related?
In our experiment, the words were related based on their meanings. (Even that is a vague concept; there are lots of different ways words can have related meanings. They might be synonyms—two words that mean abpit the same thing—like PRICE and COST. Or they might be words from the same category, like BUTTERFLY and BEE, which are both insects. Or they might be words that tend to happen a lot together; for example, DOCTOR and HOSPITAL are not synonyms, and they're not necessarily part of the same category [a doctor is a person or profession, and a hospital is a building or institution], but when you talk about hospitals you often also talk about doctors.) But words could be related in other ways, too.
This experiment by Zhou and Marslen-Wilson (2000) compares two different kinds of word relationships, to see if they both trigger priming effects. (Remember what the priming effect means? If not, you can check back at the previous activity to review.)
Browse this paper (you don't need to read and understand every word!) to try to understand the different word relationships that were used. Your goal here should not be to understand everything in the paper, but to understand the general experiment design, i.e., what kinds of word pairs were used—in particular, what kind of different word relationships they tested.
Remember that in our experiment we used two kinds of word pairs: unrelated pairs, and pairs with related meaning. This paper will introduce another kind of related word pair.
I have left some red notes in the PDF to give you suggestions and guidance on what places to focus on. There are a few things you can ignore for now:
Once you've finished, answer the reflection questions below.
Explain what kind of word pair was included in this experiment and how it's different than the kinds of word pairs we used in our own experiment earlier.
In the experiment, each target had two possible primes: for example, BEE (a target) could come after BUTTERFLY (a related prime), or it could come after EDIT (an unrelated prime). In this experiment, though, one target could have four possible primes. In one of the examples the authors give, the target is 洁净 (jie2 jing4, "clean"), and its four possible primes are:
| Related | Unrelated | |
| "A" | 卫生 | 义务 |
| "B" | 捷径 | 遗弃 |
Here I am labelling the two kinds of word relationships as "A" and "B" so I don't give away the answer, but if you've understood the paper you should be able to give descriptive labels for these relationships, e.g. "related meaning" and something else. Don't leave "A" and "B" in your table; replace them with meaningful labels.
I want you to make a new set of words that follows the same design as this experiment. You should choose one target, and then you should create four possible primes, just like in the example table above. This set of words can be in any language (but if it's in a language other than English, Cantonese, or Mandarin, you should also include translations of the words and pronunciation guides for the words, since I might not understand the language).
So, in short, you should fill in the above table, replacing all the red text with your own.
When you have finished these activities, continue to the next section of the module: "More options to consider in designing priming experiments".
by Stephen Politzer-Ahles. Last modified on 2021-07-12. CC-BY-4.0.