How much of sentence priming is word priming?

Abstract

Sentence primes were compared with two-word primes in three experiments that employed different conditions of context presentation. The two-word primes were created by deleting from the sentence primes function words assumed not to be semantically associated with the target words. Smaller priming effects were found in the two-word condition in all three experiments, and this trend was significant in two of the three experiments. Although a sizable proportion of the sentence priming effect seems to be due to word priming, factors specific to the sentence condition appear to be additional contributors to the effect. © 1988, The Psychonomic Soceity, Inc.. All rights reserved.