_{Herbert A. Meyer}

The differentiation of automatic and controlled processing is well established for semantic priming effects. Our study suggests that this differentiation can help also in the understanding of the word repetition effect. Therefore we examined the interaction of semantic priming and word repetition in an auditory perceptual identification task. In contrast to earlier studies which investigated this interaction we took into consideration not only automatic but also controlled processes of semantic priming. Our results show that word repetition and semantic priming were additive in the first half of the experiment (low practice) but not in the second half (high practice) suggesting that word repetition is additive with automatic semantic priming but not with controlled semantic priming. Our results together with studies on implicit repetition priming indicate that the word repetition effect can be splitted up into a large component based on controlled processes and a small component reflecting activation of implicit memory traces.