Measuring the semantic priming effect across many languages
Buchanan and colleagues address a gap that has sat underneath fifty years of work on how one word speeds recognition of a related word. The effect is foundational to theories of how meaning is organised in the mind, and almost all of the evidence came from small samples in a handful of languages, mostly English. This registered report tested it across nineteen languages with more than twenty-five thousand participants, using an adaptive procedure to build the largest available database of priming values. Semantic priming appeared clearly: people responded faster to related word pairs than to unrelated ones. The models also showed that language itself accounted for meaningful variation, so the size of the effect differs from one language to another rather than being a fixed property of the mind. The protocol was accepted by the journal before any data were collected. This vault cites it as the counterpart to the failures of behavioural priming: the semantic version is robust, and the two should not be confused.
Buchanan and colleagues address a gap that has sat underneath fifty years of work on how one word speeds recognition of a related word. The effect is foundational to theories of how meaning is organised in the mind, and almost all of the evidence came from small samples in a handful of languages, mostly English. This registered report tested it across nineteen languages with more than twenty-five thousand participants, using an adaptive procedure to build the largest available database of priming values. Semantic priming appeared clearly: people responded faster to related word pairs than to unrelated ones. The models also showed that language itself accounted for meaningful variation, so the size of the effect differs from one language to another rather than being a fixed property of the mind. The protocol was accepted by the journal before any data were collected. This vault cites it as the counterpart to the failures of behavioural priming: the semantic version is robust, and the two should not be confused.
Written from the abstract, Europe PMC.
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Buchanan, E. M., Cuccolo, K., Heyman, T., et al. (2025). "Measuring the semantic priming effect across many languages." Nature Human Behaviour, 10(1), 182-201. A Registered Report, 19 languages, n = 25,163.
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https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-025-02254-x
DOI: 10.1038/s41562-025-02254-x