The experiment used for the study was a lexical decision task that required subjects to indicate whether a stimulus was a word or a non-word by pressing a button with the index finger of one hand or the opposite hand, respectively. The hand used for the button press was counter-balanced across subjects. Subjects were instructed to respond as quickly and as accurately as possible. Within the above framework, the present study involved a semantic priming paradigm. The subjects were sequentially presented with a partially randomized list of 150 words and 150 non-words with a uniform inter-stimulus interval of 1600 ms. The exposure time for each stimulus was 150 msec. Among the 150 words, 50 words (primed) were always preceded by their antonyms (prime: n = 50), whereas the remaining 50 words (unprimed) were unrelated and sometimes preceded and/or were followed by the non-words. The remaining 150 stimuli consisted of non-words comprising jumbled letters (Figure 1). The prime-antonym pairs (prime and primed words) were always preceded and followed by a non-word.
