Evidence for expectancy‐based priming in the pronunciation task was provided in three experiments. In Experiments 1 and 2, a high proportion of associatively related trials produced greater associative priming and superior retrieval of primes in a subsequent test of memory for primes, whereas high‐and low‐proportion groups showed comparable repetition benefits in perceptual identification of previously presented primes. In Experiment 2. the low‐proportion condition had few associatively related pairs but many identity pairs. In Experiment 3, identity priming was greater in a high‐than a low‐identity proportion group, with similar repetition benefits and prime retrieval responses for the two groups. These results indicate that when the prime‐target relationship is salient, subjects strategically vary their processing of the prime according to the nature of the prime‐targ