The types of processing that can occur under subliminal stimuli are continuously being debated. Studies have found that individuals can learn to associate subliminal primes with specific tasks to facilitate task performance, and such learning is highly adaptive and generalizable. Meanwhile, conditioning studies suggest that associative learning and generalization actually occur at the semantic level. Using words and their orthographical neighbors as stimuli, we assess whether prime-task associations can be learned and generalized on a semantic basis. We aim to show for the first time that semantic learning and generalization occurs outside of aversive/reward learning, and that semantic priming can occur for arbitrary-linked stimuli in a context completely devoid of semantics. Visible and subliminal primes would also be directly compared, as studies have counterintuitively suggested that both the learning of task-priming and the semantic priming of word neighbors depend on the lack of stimulus visibility.