Experimental design: schematic diagram of sequences used in RP (upper panel) and CTR (lower panel).

<p>The example here pertains to the case when “pig” served as the target (onomatopoeia “oink” primes pig: OP), but an identical scheme of stimulation (not shown) was used when “oink” served as the target and “pig” (PO) as either the repetitive prime (RP) or the single prime preceding the target (CTR). The stimuli “duck” and “quack” served as “filler” stimuli and were used to prevent immediate proximity between “oink” and “pig” within the varying segments in CTR so that the target would have the same probability of occurrence as in RP (∼17%). A complete run was divided into eight 54 msec segments separated by a 2 sec interval, each containing 54 stimuli (targets, primes and in CTR also fillers) with an SOA of 1 sec. Stimulus duration was 330 msec. For each condition (RP, CTR) there were two different sequences, one for each target-type. The four sequences were first ordered according to a Latin-square design to minimize carry-over effects and then mirror-imaged for the second part of the run. Each run started and ended with a period of 30 sec duration of white noise that served as the baseline. Note that the study used auditory stimuli (not visual), i.e., naturally produced speech stimuli (the words: “oink”, “pig”, “duck” and “quack”) and that there were three exemplars of each word.