The present study examined if derived relations under contextual control could produce
association and mediated priming in lexical decision tasks. Participants’ responses to
nonarbitrary stimulus relations of Sameness and Opposition were brought under contextual
control. Next, participants were exposed to arbitrary matching-to-sample training in the
presence of these same contextual cues, using word-like nonwords as stimuli (the participants
were told these were “foreign” words). Participants were then given a series of lexical
decision tasks, which included the foreign words and previously unseen “nonsense” stimuli.
The task was to decide whether both stimuli were foreign words. Response times to pairs
of foreign words were reliably faster when both of the stimuli were related than when
they were unrelated; that is, association and mediated priming effects for related stimuli
were demonstrated.