Background and Aim: The short-term memory (STM) has been studied to a great extent so far. Using some strategies and techniques to help the subject to access to his/her memory is important for Speech pathologist. Priming is a process that increases the chance of accessing to some information of memory by means of some simulations. So, primings are some words which facilitate the retrieval of the target words. The purpose of this study is comparing phonological and semantic priming on the short verbal memory span.
Materials and Methods: The research was conducted on sixty-four 18-25 year-old male students in Tehran University of Medical sciences. Due to some distortion factors, including bilingualism, stutter-ing, and articulation problem, that can effect the reaction time, were determined as exclusion critenia. In additiion, subjects with difficulty in Wepman auditory discrimination were ruled out. The test was performed via the second version of programmed DMDX software and reaction time was recorded.
Results: Semantic tasks and rhyming tasks were retrieved faster than the other tasks in lexical access respectively. There was a significant difference between the semantic and rime tasks but there is no significant difference between alliteration and unrelated tasks.
Conclusion: The result of this research indicates that the semantic level is activated faster than the other levels and the phonological level is activated right after that. The alliteration level is the last level that activated. It has some similarities with some other investigations on the reaction time in phono-logical tasks