In the semantic priming paradigm, accuracy and reaction time to a target-stimulus that is preceded by a prime (semantic related or unrelated to the target) are measured. This paper presents a pre-experimental study on word semantic association norms with 156 children and an experimental study that evaluated the effect of semantic priming in 24 children during a lexical decision task. Results showed that the lexical decisions for real targets were significantly slower and less accurate in the unrelated prime condition than in the related one. It means that there were semantic priming effects in children during visual recognition of words, that is, the semantic context pre-activated the target word representation, facilitating the lexical decision in the semantic related condition.
Semantic Priming; Lexical Access; Semantic Processing; Children; Lexical Decision
