Is there semantic priming with verbs? Evidence from word naming in Italian

The effect of grammatical class on semantic priming has been poorly investigated so far. In a first experiment we used primes and probes belonging to different grammatical classes (e.g., foodN-eatV) and no facilitation emerged. This result may be explained either semantically (structurally different semantic representations - i.e. functional vs visual, relational vs denotative- do not facilitate each other) or syntactically (i.e., no priming across grammatical classes). In a second experiment, we used strongly related noun-verb pairs in which prime and probe denote very close concepts (ideaN-thinkV): again, no priming emerged, suggesting that the semantic hypothesis is not correct. In a third experiment, we tested noun-noun and verb-verb pairs (dogN-catN; eatV-drinkV): semantic priming emerged with nouns (as usual), but not with verbs . Altogether, the experiments indicate that the mere presence of a verb in a prime-probe pair prevents semantic priming from emerging.