LIN 3042 Applied Linguistics · Fall 2026
Priming demo
A two-minute word experiment from this week’s reading. Please do it once, on one device.
AI disclaimer. Content guided by Tommie Juzek; built upon his prompting by an AI assistant (Claude Opus 5.5, Anthropic); reviewed and approved by Tommie Juzek.
How it works. A + appears, then a short word flashes very briefly, then a word in CAPITALS appears. Decide as fast as you can whether the word in CAPITALS is a real English word:
- a real word: tap Word (on a laptop, press J);
- not a real word: tap Not a word (on a laptop, press F).
Be quick, but try not to make mistakes. You do not need to do anything with the short word; just keep your eyes on the +.
It takes about two minutes: 4 practice trials, then 48 for real. Your answers stay in your browser; nothing is sent anywhere.
That was the practice. Now 48 for real, about two minutes, without a break. Same task: as fast as you can, with as few mistakes as you can.
Your result
For the show of hands in class, your bracket is .
| After a related word (like cat → DOG) | |
|---|---|
| After an unrelated word (like bat → DOG) | |
| Correct answers |
What was going on
Half of the real words came after a related word (cat → DOG), half after an unrelated one (bat → DOG). This is the experiment in Figure 11.2 of the textbook (p. 431). If seeing cat warms up dog in your mental lexicon, you should answer faster after a related word. Your priming effect is the difference: your time after an unrelated word minus your time after a related word. A positive number means priming.
For each kind, this uses your middle response time (the median), so one slow trial does not throw the number off. Only correct answers count.
Twelve trials of each kind give a noisy number for one person. Zero or negative results are common and do not mean anything went wrong. The class as a whole is the real test.
Your trials
| # | Short word | CAPITALS | Kind | Your answer | Time |
|---|