Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

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