Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The effect of featural priming on word identiiication was investigated as a test of the interactive activation model of word perception put forth by McClelland and Rumelhart (1981). Observers were presented with a 250 msec featural prime, which was either consistent with or inconsistent with the letters in the target word that immediately followed. Reading latencies were recorded for 96 trials per subject. A neutral prime condition consisting of a random dot pattern was used as a control in order to obtain baseline identification times. The prediction of the interactive activation model that mean reading latency would be significantly longer for words that were primed with inconsistent features than for those that were primed with consistent features was confirmed, adding to the empirical support for the model.