The fascinating thing about priming is that it occurs at such a low level—priming speeds up identifying letters as forming a word, which one would expect to take place before you deliberate on the word’s meaning.
I would not expect this to take place before deliberating on a word’s meaning. Think about it. How would you know if a string of letters is a word? If it corresponds to a meaning. Thus you have to search for a meaning in order to determine if the string of letters is a word. If it were a string of letters like alskjdfljasdfl, it would be obvious sooner, since it’s unpronouncable and visually jarring, but something like “banack” could be a word, if it only had a meaning attached to it. So you have to check to see if there is a meaning there. So it doesn’t seem all that strange to me that if you prime the neural pathways of a word’s meaning, you’d recognize it as a word sooner.
I would not expect this to take place before deliberating on a word’s meaning. Think about it. How would you know if a string of letters is a word? If it corresponds to a meaning. Thus you have to search for a meaning in order to determine if the string of letters is a word. If it were a string of letters like alskjdfljasdfl, it would be obvious sooner, since it’s unpronouncable and visually jarring, but something like “banack” could be a word, if it only had a meaning attached to it. So you have to check to see if there is a meaning there. So it doesn’t seem all that strange to me that if you prime the neural pathways of a word’s meaning, you’d recognize it as a word sooner.