The effect of semantically related verbs and associated noun primes on object picture naming

Primed naming paradigms have shown that the semantically associated noun primes facilitate naming speed of noun targets. However, few studies controlled for co-occurrence when developing prime-target stimuli, which might have provided a boost in facilitation due to phonological activation between the prime and target. Also, there is limited information about how verb primes affect noun naming. Therefore, the aims of this study were to investigate whether naming speed of nouns is facilitated by associated noun primes after controlling co-occurrence values between primes and targets, and whether naming speed of thematic role nouns is facilitated by semantically related verb primes. We presented associated noun primes with object pictures, and semantically related verb primes with instrument and patient object pictures to be named at 50 and 300 SOAs. The results, which differ from the literature, show that associated noun primes slowed down target noun naming, and the semantically related verb prime slowed down patient noun naming but not instrument noun naming. We suggest that co-occurrence may have played a partial role in facilitating noun naming in previous studies. We also discuss that slowed noun naming may be due to competition between the target and other concepts activated by the prime. Further studies are needed to test this hypothesis.