When pseudowords acquire meaning: effect of semantic associations on pseudoword repetition priming

In Experiment 1, priming increased with additional presentations when the priming task was to generate a potential meaning for each pseudoword but not when the priming task was to read each pseudoword aloud. In Experiments 2 and 3, repetition effects were found when Ss attempted to learn definitions assigned to the pseudowords by the experimenter. Equivalent levels of priming were found regardless of whether the definition assigned to a pseudoword changed or remained the same over 3 trials, although recall of the definitions was better for the consistently defined pseudowords. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that the same mechanism underlies both word and pseudoword priming, except that words (and pseudowords that acquire meaning) benefit from the priming of orthographic-semantic associations.