The aim of the present study was to investigate whether learning a meaningless phonological word-form, can affect its ability to compete with other words shortly after it was learned. According to previous experimental work we expected that a semantic referent (Leach & Samuel, 2007), and/or consolidation over a significant amount of time (Gaskell& Dumay, 2003) are necessary for a novel word-form to be able to engage in lateral inhibition with other words. In order to examine this we used the experimental design that was used by Dahan, Magnuson, Tanenhaus and Hogan (2001). Experiment 1 was a replication of the Dahan et al (2001) study. In Experiment 2 we added a condition in which a novel word was now assigned the role of the competitor, by inserting a nonword learning task (that was performed right before the Dahan task). The goal was to see whether any differences would arise between this new novel-word condition and the nonword condition. The results from Experiment 2 were inconclusive due to the stimulus set and this is why we conducted Experiment 3, which was similar to Experiment 2, but had a different stimulus set. The results of Experiment 3 showed that, in contrast to the predictions, a novel word can compete with other words, even if it does not have meaning and, moreover, this happens immediately after training. These findings indicate that 1) a word does not have to be complete (i.e. include semantic information) in order to compete with other words and 2) connections between novel and known words can form faster than what has been suggested.

Syftet med studien var att studera effekten av priming vid ordstamskomplettering. Mina frågeställningar var 1) har priming en effekt på kompletteringen av sammansatta ords ordstammar? 2) är en svarstid på fyra sekunder för kort för kompletterandet av en ordstam? 3) kompletteras ordstammarna med det första ordet försökspersonerna kommer på? För att besvara mina frågeställningar utförde jag ett experiment. Den oberoende variabeln var priming eller inte priming av sammansatta ord, och den beroende variabeln var antalet korrekt kompletterade ordstammar. Svarstiden var fyra sekunder och antalet ordstammar var 226. Efteråt ställde jag dem frågor om hur de gått tillväga när de svarat. Antalet korrekt kompletterade ordstammar var signifikant högre för de sammansatta ord som försökspersonerna hade primats på (p<.001), vilket visar att priming har effekt på kompletteringen av sammansatta ords ordstammar, samt att hela ord kan användas som ordstam. En svarstid på fyra sekunder korrelerade inte med ett stort antal missade svar (M = 9, SD = 4), vilket visar att en svarstid på fyra sekunder inte är för kort. Enligt försökspersonerna svarade de, på i snitt 4% av ordstammarna (M = 10, SD = 9), inte med det första ordet de kom på, vilket antyder om att ordstammar nästan uteslutande kompletteras med det första ordet försökspersoner kommer på. / The purpose of the study was to examine if priming has an effect on word stem completion. The questions I wanted to answer was 1) does priming have an effect on the completion of the word stems of compound words? 2) is a response time of four seconds too short for the completion of a word stem? 3) are the word stems completed with the first word that comes to the subject’s minds? To answer my questions, I performed an experiment. The independent variable was priming or not priming of compound words, and the dependent variable was the number of correctly completed word stems. The response time was four seconds and the number of word stems was 226. Afterwards I asked them questions about how they did when they answered. The number of correctly completed word stems was significantly higher for the compound words that the subjects had been primed for (p<.001), which shows that priming has an effect on the completion of the word stems of compound words, and that a whole word can be used as a word stem. A response time of four seconds did not correlate with a big number of missed answers (M= 9, SD = 4), which shows that a response time of four seconds is not too short. According to the subjects they, on an average of 4% of the word stems (M = 10, SD = 9), did not answer with the first word that came to mind, which suggests that word stems almost exclusively are completed with the first word that comes to subject’s minds.