In psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics, "priming" refers to the phenomenon whereby a subject can recognize a word more quickly if he or she has recently been presented with a word that is similar in meaning or morphological makeup (i.e., composed of similar parts). If a subject is presented with a "prime" word such as "doctor" and then a "target" word such as "nurse", if the subject has a faster-than-usual response time to "nurse" then the experimenter may assume that word "nurse" in the brain had already been accessed when the word "doctor" was accessed. Priming is used to investigate a wide variety of questions about how words are stored and retrieved in the brain and how structurally complex sentences are processed.