Interaction of prime repetition with visual degradation: Is priming a retrieval phenomenon?

Pronunciation of a word can be facilitated by preceding its presentation with that of an associatively related word. This associative priming effect has been interpreted as produced by activation spreading through a network. In such models, processing of the prime cannot be made conditional on unforeseen events. We manipulated the degradation and relatedness of a word following the prime, and observed the effects on the time taken to pronounce a repetition of the prime. Contrary to the predictions of spreading activation accounts, we observed that pronunciation of the repeated prime was fastest when the second word was degraded and related to the prime. We interpret this to mean that degradation of the second word caused unitization of that word with its prime. We argue that such qualitative shifts may be best understood in terms of changes in retrieval processing.