Four experiments are presented that demonstrate that mediated priming (e.g., lion stripes) does not rely on weak, although direct, semantic relationships or lexical co-occurrence as suggested by McKoon and Ratcliff (1992). A view of mediation in priming consistent with a distributed view of memory is presented that relies on shared contexts between the prime and target. Not all mediated items appear to share contexts, and ones that do not also do not show mediated priming. The focus on contextual mediation is consistent with how word meanings are acquired as modeled by the HAL memory model.

A set of analyses are presented that replicate the mediated priming effect (e.g., lion-stripes) using a naming latency task, and demonstrate that the mediated priming effect is influenced by individual differences in sensitivity to this priming effect. Previous research (Livesay & Burgess, 1998) has shown that stimulus differences are a major factor in whether or not mediated priming is obtained. The present research explores the influence of verbal ability on this effect. The primary finding is that individuals with low verbal ability are not sensitive to mediated word relationships, whereas, individuals with high verbal ability manifest a robust mediated priming effect

A series of experiments are presented that replicate the mediated priming effect (e.g., lion-stripes) using a naming latency task, and demonstrates that mediated priming does not rely on weak, but direct, semantic relationships or lexical co-occurrence as suggested by McKoon and Ratchff (1992). The magnitude of mediated priming is not negatively correlated with either semantic relatedness or lexical co-occurrence as McKoon and Ratcliff would predict. Furthermore, we show that differences in the contextual nature of the prime - target pairs affects whether or not mediated priming occurs. These findings are discussed in the context of the HAL memory model suggesting a view of "mediated" priming that is more consistent with a distributed representational view.