121 undergraduates were tested on 12 single-solution anagrams. Each anagram had either a category-label prime, a list-item prime or no prime. Compared with the no-prime condition, both the category label and list-item primes produced a significant reduction in solution time. The list-item prime effect was restricted to anagrams that were difficult to solve as measured by bigram transitional probability. The conditional nature of the priming effect was discussed in terms of strategies for solution of anagrams.
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