“Do You See Yonder Cloud?”: on priming concepts, a new test and a familiar outcome. Reply to Lucas et al.: “Familiarity or conceptual priming? Good question! Comment on Stenberg, Hellman, Johansson, and Rosén (2009)”

Lucas, Voss, and Paller sympathize with our intentions but disagree with our findings. They argue that a relation between frequency and conceptual priming may have been obscured by methodological details in our second experiment, therefore failing to complete a bridge between conceptual priming and FN400 with name frequency as the mediator. However, renewed inspections of our experiment and a new additional experiment, designed to meet the objections, fail to find any role for name frequency in conceptual priming and therefore re-establish the dissociation of priming and the FN400. On closer inspection, our differing views seem to derive from different interpretations of the term “concept.”