Alcoholic Korsakoff patients have been shown to have normal repetition priming for words, but impaired priming for pseudowords, on perceptual identification tasks. Because real words, but not pseudowords, have semantic representations, successful priming of real words has been attributed to semantic activation. Alternatively, however, priming might reflect the perceptual, i.e. orthographic and phonological familiarity associated with real words in comparison with pseudowords. In order to examine which of these factors accounts for normal priming by amnesics, Experiment 1 was designed to contrast perceptual identification priming for words, pseudowords and pseudohomonyms (e.g. "phaire"). On this task, Korsakoff patients showed normal priming for real words and for pseudohomonyms, but significantly impaired priming for pseudowords. It was felt that since pseudohomonyms are orthographically unfamiliar but could access semantics through their phonological route, activation of a semantic representation rather than perceptual familiarity might be the critical factor underlying successful priming. Experiment 2 was then designed to further explore the robustness of this semantically mediated priming by presenting different word types within the same study list. Under these conditions, Korsakoffs' pseudohomonym priming was consistently below normal. This suggests that priming in Korsakoff patients depends upon the conceptual salience of the stimuli and not solely on semantic activation.