Word context during initial exposure influences degree of priming in word fragment completion.

Priming in word fragment completion is revealed by the increased probability of correctly completing a fragment like "_ll_p_e " when the word "ellipse " was seen recently. Three experiments investigated the effects on priming of manipulating the context in which the words were seen. Three principal results emerged. Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrated that there was much more priming for words studied in a to-be-learned list than read in meaningful passages. In these same two experiments, low-frequency words were subject to more priming than were higher frequency words, regardless of context. Experiment 3 revealed more priming for words when they did not fit sensibly into connected discourse than when they did. The results suggest that context plays a critical role in priming: As a word moves from being contextually bound in meaningful discourse to being isolated in a list, its probability of priming increases. The distinction between aware and unaware access to memory has become the subject of increased research attention in the 1980s, fostering interest in a growing set of new memory tests. This article focuses on one of these new tests, the word fragment completion test. Here, a person is given parts of