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Description: Models of semantic representation predict that automatic priming is determined by associative and co-occurrence relations (i.e., spreading activation accounts), or to similarity in words' semantic features (i.e., featural models of semantic representation). Although, these three factors are correlated to some extent in characterizing semantic representation, they are not entirely overlapping and seem to tap different aspects of word meaning. The authors designed two lexical decision experiments to dissociate these three different types of meaning similarity. For unmasked primes, they observed priming only due to association strength and not the other two measures; and no evidence for differences in priming effects for concrete and abstract concepts. For masked primes there was no priming effect regardless of the semantic relation. These results challenge theoretical accounts of automatic priming. Rather, they are in line with the idea that priming may be due to participants’ controlled strategic processes, such as prospective expectancy generation. Together, these results provide important insight about the nature of priming effects and how association strength, as determined from word-association norms, relates to the nature of semantic representation. The materials in this project go along with the pre-registration of Experiment 2 of a two-experiment priming project (doi: 10.17605/OSF.IO/F8J9M)