Three experiments explored the extent to which word fragment completion and word stem completion could be "primed," or facilitated, by prior study of the words. In Experiment 1, the manner in which the words were studied beforehand had little effect on priming of either kind of completion, but delaying the test reduced the amount of priming. More importantly, priming of fragment completion decreased over the delay to a greater degree than priming of stem completion. In Experiment 2, this interaction was not replicated when both fragments and stems were constructed without controlling the number of possible completions and were placed in the same test. In a third experiment, the number of response alternatives did not affect priming of stem completion. It was concluded that differences in the amount of priming of fragment completion and stem completion cannot be easily explained by the number of response alternatives or by the task difficulty.