Abstract: The purpose of this study was comparing the phonological and semantic priming on the short verbal memory span. The research was conducted on sixty four male students of Tehran University of Medicinal Science. Due to some distorting factors on the reaction time, some exclusion criteria were adapted such as bilingualism, stuttering, articulation problems, etc. The qualified subjects were tested by auditory-discrimination test (Wepman test). Then all subjects were performed a test that was prepared under second version of DMDX software and the reaction time and accuracy were recorded. The results reveal that the semantic tasks were retrieved faster and better than the other tasks in lexical access. Then, riming tasks were retrieved. There was no significant difference between the alliteration and unrelated prime. In accuracy tasks, the difference between rime-alliteration and alliteration-unrelated tasks were not significant. The result of this research indicates that the semantic level is activated faster than rest of the levels and the phonological level is activated right after that.

Keywords