Connectivity among semantic associates: an fMRI study of semantic priming.

Semantic priming refers to a reduction in the reaction time to identify or make a judgment about a stimulus that has been immediately preceded by a semantically related word or picture and is thought to result from a partial overlap in the semantic associates of the two words. A semantic priming lexical decision task using spoken words was presented in event-related fMRI and behavioral paradigms. Word pairs varied in terms of semantic relatedness and the connectivity between associates.