Sandwich priming effects in picture naming

Studies of lexical access in speech planning often use priming or interference paradigms, where a target picture is combined with a written prime or distracter word. A difficulty in interpreting the results of studies using interference paradigms with clearly visible distracters is that effects arising during lexical access cannot be distinguished from effects arising during self-monitoring. A difficulty with using masked priming paradigms is that the effects tend to be small and fragile. We report a series of picture naming experiments using both the conventional masked priming procedure and the sandwich priming procedure first used in lexical decision experiments by Lupker and masked prime the participants are briefly (i.e., 33 ms) presented the name of the target picture. Although neither categorically nor phonologically related primes significantly affected picture naming in the traditional masked priming experiments, in the sandwich priming experiments: (a) categorically related primes (e.g. “dog-cat”) interfered more than unrelated distracters with picture naming and (b) phonologically related primes (“mat-cat”) facilitated picture naming. The theoretical implications of these findings will be discussed. Lupker, S.J., & Davis, C.J. (2009). Sandwich priming: A method for overcoming the limitations of masked priming by reducing lexical competition effects. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition, 35, 618-639