Semantic Priming across the Globe

25.09.2025

We contributed to a global study published in Nature Human Behaviour that analyzed 21 million trials across 30 languages, revealing semantic priming as a robust cognitive mechanism across cultures and writing systems.

Claus Lamm and Ekaterina Pronizius were among the contributors to this registered report, which presents the largest cross-linguistic study on semantic priming to date. Spanning 30 languages (with full datasets in 19), the study used computationally selected stimuli and a continuous lexical decision task to collect over 21 million trials. The results reveal consistent and robust priming effects across both Latin and non-Latin languages, pointing to a generalizable cognitive mechanism of semantic priming. The project also provides a large open dataset for future psycholinguistic research.

If you are interested in large-scale collaborations, check out the ManyLanguages community (https://many-languages.com/).

Full text:

Buchanan, E. M., Cuccolo, K., Heyman, T., van Berkel, N., Coles, N. A., Iyer, A., Peters, K., van ’t Veer, A. E., Montefinese, M., Maxwell, N. P., Taylor, J. E., Valentine, K. D., Arriaga, P., Barzykowski, K., Boucher, L., Collins, W. M., Vaidis, D. C., Aczel, B., Al-Hoorie, A. H., ... [Lamm, C., and Pronizius, E.] ... Lewis, S. C. (2025). Measuring the semantic priming effect across many languages. Nature Human Behaviour. Advance online publication. doi.org/10.1038/s41562-025-02254-x

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