Priming Effects in a Lexical Decision Task Based on Transposed-Letter Word Pairs

The article presents an experimental study in which the priming effects were measured in the lexical task based on transposed-letter word pairs. Thirty-six pairs of words were selected, in which one word could be transformed into another with the rearrangement of letters. At the first stage, the participants were given the task "Word pairs" which preactivated one of the two words in a pair. At the second stage, the participants had to perform spatial intelligence test. At the third stage, the participants were performing the lexical decision task in which preactivated, alternative and control words were used as stimuli. We hypothesized that the experimental effect will correspond to the results of previous experiments with unconscious priming, namely: 1) words which are identical to the primes presented before will demonstrate positive priming effect, but 2) words which consist of the same letters as primes but have different meaning will demonstrate negative priming effect. The results showed that the response time for the preactivated words was significantly lower than for alternative and control words. At the same time, the alternative words were identified slower then control words although they were not presented at the first stage, and the participants didn't know that a new word could be constructed from the letters of the presented stimulus. According to the visual word recognition models, such results could be explained by the notion that this is the semantic processes that are involved at very early stages of word recognition that cause inhibition of stimuli with alternative semantics. However, taking into account that we have changed the classical procedure of the masked unconscious priming to delayed conscious priming, we suppose that our results demonstrate some general regularities of thinking. For instance, the established effects correspond to the data obtained in E. A. Valueva's study of the influence of incubation on solving anagrams with two answers. One of the possible theoretical interpretations of the acquired data could be the theory of unconscious negative choice developed by V. M. Allakhverdov.