汉语短时序列回忆中的语音相似性和视觉相似性效应

语音相似性效应和视觉相似性效应是短时序列回忆中的两个典型性效应, 但前人很少探讨这两种效应的交互作用。本研究利用汉语字形和语音的属性, 观察汉字短时序列回忆中语音相似性效应、视觉相似性效应及两者的交互作用。研究结果发现当回忆项目在语音或视觉上单纯相似或不相似时, 视觉相似性效应及其与语音相似性的交互作用与混合词表条件下所发现的结果有很大的不同。这个研究结果为丰富和补充相关理论模型提供了进一步实证依据。     

Phonological,visual, and semantic coding strategies and children's short-term picture memory span

Three experiments addressed controversies in the previous literature on the development of phonological and other forms of short-term memory coding in children, using assessments of picture memory span that ruled out potentially confounding effects of verbal input and output. Picture materials were varied in terms of phonological similarity, visual similarity, semantic similarity, and word length. Older children (6/8-year-olds), but not younger children (4/5-year-olds), demonstrated robust and consistent phonological similarity and word length effects, indicating that they were using phonological coding strategies. This confirmed findings initially reported by Conrad (1971), but subsequently questioned by other authors. However, in contrast to some previous research, little evidence was found for a distinct visual coding stage at 4 years, casting doubt on assumptions that this is a developmental stage that consistently precedes phonological coding. There was some evidence for a dual visual and phonological coding stage prior to exclusive use of phonological coding at around 5–6 years. Evidence for semantic similarity effects was limited, suggesting that semantic coding is not a key method by which young children recall lists of pictures.     

On the Irrelevance of Phonological Similarity to the Irrelevant Speech Effect

Irrelevant background speech disrupts immediate recall of visually presented items. Salame and Baddeley (1982) found that increasing the phonological similarity between the irrelevant speech and the visual items greatly increased this disruption. In contrast, Jones and Macken (1995) found little evidence for such an increase. The present experiments directly manipulated the phonological similarity of the irrelevant speech background and the to-be-remembered visual items. Experiments 1-4 compared background speech that shared virtually no phonemes with the visual stimuli with background speech that shared all of the phonemes of the visual stimuli. No effectof phonological similarity was found.Experiment5 replicatedthe method of Salame and Baddeley's critical experimentbut nottheir results. With regard to the two primary explanations ofthe irrelevant speech effect, these data present a strong challenge to the phonological store hypothesis while offering some support to the changing state hypothesis.     

Phonological, visual, and semantic coding strategies and children's short-term picture memory span

Three experiments addressed controversies in the previous literature on the development of phonological and other forms of short-term memory coding in children, using assessments of picture memory span that ruled out potentially confounding effects of verbal input and output. Picture materials were varied in terms of phonological similarity, visual similarity, semantic similarity, and word length. Older children (6/8-year-olds), but not younger children (4/5-year-olds), demonstrated robust and consistent phonological similarity and word length effects, indicating that they were using phonological coding strategies. This confirmed findings initially reported by Conrad (1971), but subsequently questioned by other authors. However, in contrast to some previous research, little evidence was found for a distinct visual coding stage at 4 years, casting doubt on assumptions that this is a developmental stage that consistently precedes phonological coding. There was some evidence for a dual visual and phonological coding stage prior to exclusive use of phonological coding at around 5-6 years. Evidence for semantic similarity effects was limited, suggesting that semantic coding is not a key method by which young children recall lists of pictures.     

Visual and phonological codes in repetition blindness.

Repetition blindness (RB) is the inability to detect or recall a repeated word in rapid serial visual presentation. The role of visual versus phonological (name) similarity in RB was examined. RB was found for single letters, whether printed in the same or different cases, and for single digits, whether represented verbally (nine), as arabic numerals (9), or in a mixture of the 2 formats. Hence, visual similarity is not necessary to produce RB. RB was obtained between homophonic pairs (won/one), showing that phonological similarity is sufficient to produce RB, although visual identity also contributes to RB. It is proposed that RB results when the codes used for initial registration of the targets in short-term memory are similar. This initial code may be predominantly visual or predominantly phonological.     

Irrelevant Speech,Phonological Similarity,and Presentation Modality

The phonological similarity effect refers to the finding that a list of similarsounding items is recalled less well than a list of dissimilar-sounding items. A strong prediction of the phonological store hypothesis, based on Baddeley's (1986, 1992) working memory framework, is that irrelevant speech should interact with the phonological similarity effect. We report three experiments that demonstrate that irrelevant speech eliminates the phonological similarity effect for visual but not for auditory items. In this respect, irrelevant speech functions much like articulatory suppression. Implications for the phonological store and changing state hypotheses are discussed.     

Visual and phonological components of working memory in children

Previous studies have shown that young children's immediate memory for a short series of drawings of objects is mediated by a visual component of working memory, whereas older children rely chiefly upon a phonological component. Three experiments investigated the hypothesis that older children rely also, but to a lesser extent, on visual working memory. Experiment 1 confirmed previous evidence that 11-year-olds' memory is disrupted by phonemic similarity of object names, but is unaffected by visual similarity of the objects themselves. However, when articulatory suppression was used to prevent phonological coding, levels of recall were sensitive to visual rather than phonemic similarity. Experiment 2 compared the effects of interpolating an auditory-verbal or a visual postlist task on memory for drawings viewed either with or without suppression. The visual task had a clear disruptive effect only in the suppression condition, where it interfered selectively with recall of the most recent item. Experiment 3 compared the effects of interpolating an auditory-verbal or a mixed-modality (visual-auditory) postlist task when subjects were not required to suppress. There was greater interference from the mixed-modality task, and this effect was confined to the last item presented. These experiments are taken as confirming the presence of a small but reliable contribution from visual memory in 11-year-old children's recall. As in younger children, visual working memory in 11-year-olds is sensitive to visual similarity and is responsible for a final-item visual recency effect. The results also show that older children's use of visual working memory is usually masked by the more pervasive phonological component of recall. Some implications for the structure of working memory and its development are discussed.     

Orthographic and phonological activation in recognizing Chinese characters

This paper is a contribution to the study of whether visual contact with lexical units in any writing system necessarily arouses their corresponding phonological information. In two experiments it was investigated whether phonological information is automatically activated during the semantic processing of Chinese characters. In these experiments, both using a semantic-categorization task, subjects produced the same proportion of false positive categorization errors and showed the same decision latencies on homophone foils and their non-homophonic controls, thus indicating that phonological information does not seem to affect the semantic task. Experiment 2 further revealed that subjects made more errors and produced longer response times on graphemically similar foils than on the corresponding controls. The absence of phonological effects and the presence of clear effects of visual similarity for Chinese characters in semantic tasks can be taken to indicate that phonological information may not be automatically activated during the processing of meanings of Chinese characters. The present results also cast serious doubts on the hypothesis that phonological activation is a universal principle of lexical processing.     

Phonological priming in the lexical decision task: A failure to replicate

Some models of the lexicon predict that recognition of words should produce activation spreading to phonologically related words. Consistent with this prediction, Hillinger (1980) demonstrated priming in a visual lexical decision task for word targets preceded by graphemically similar or graphemically dissimilar primes that rhymed with the target. In Experiment 1, we investigated whether this phonological priming effect occurred automatically or because of subject strategies. Although semantically associated primes produced significant facilitation in Experiment 1, no evidence of phonological priming was obtained. Experiments 2 to 5 were conducted in an attempt to obtain the phonological priming effect. Experiment 5 was a replication of one of Hillinger’s experiments. In none of these experiments was phonological priming observed. These results indicate either that the lexicon is not organized such that spreading activation occurs on the basis of phonological similarity, or that visual lexical decisions are made without phonological mediation.     

动态视觉加工与儿童汉字阅读

使用视觉阈限测验、图片命名、字形相似性判断实验和语音意识等测验 ,考察了小学五年级儿童视觉加工技能与汉字阅读之间的关系。结果发现 :动态视觉加工与图片命名错误率、字形判断反应时和错误率、语音意识均有显著相关 ,静态视觉加工只与图片命名错误率相关显著 ;控制识字量后的偏相关分析显示 ,动态视觉加工与其他变量的相关关系不变 ,静态视觉加工与图片命名错误率的相关不再显著 ;回归分析发现动态视觉加工在识字量和语音意识的影响控制后 ,能够分别解释阅读流畅性、字形判断反应时和图片命名错误率 7%、2 5 %和 5 6 %的变化 ;语音意识能够解释识字量和阅读流畅性 9%和 10 %的变化 ;对差读者的动态视觉加工和语音意识分析发现 ,儿童在这两种测验上的个体差异很大。上述结果表明 ,阅读过程受基本知觉技能影响 ,动态视觉加工作用于汉字阅读的特定过程。     

The phonological store of working memory: is it phonological and is it a store?

The phonological store construct of the working memory model is critically evaluated. Three experiments test the prediction that the effect of irrelevant sound and the effect of phonological similarity each survive the action of articulatory suppression but only when presentation of to-be-remembered lists is auditory, not visual. No evidence was found to support the interaction predicted among irrelevant speech, modality, and articulatory suppression. Although evidence for an interaction among modality, phonological similarity, and articulatory suppression was found, its presence could be diminished by a suffix, which is an acoustic, not a phonological factor. Coupled with other evidence--from the irrelevant sound effect and errors in natural speech--the action attributed to the phonological store seems better described in terms of a combination of auditory-perceptual and output planning mechanisms.     

Phonological similarity effects on detecting change in simple arrays

In two experiments, we investigated the effects on change detection and identification of the phonological similarity of the names of drawn objects shown in simple arrays. Experiment 1 examined the effects of phonological similarity on report of identity changes (in which one object was replaced by another) in a five-item array and Experiment 2 its effects on reporting switch changes (in which objects exchanged places). Phonological similarity did not impair change detection, and identification of new objects on change trials was more accurate in Experiment 1. H owever, phonological similarity significantly reduced change detection and identification of objects that switched location in Experiment 2. The results indicate different roles for a visual short-term memory system such as the visuospatial sketchpad and for phonological coding and storage in detecting and identifying replaced objects and object locations in arrays.     

SKOOL versus ZOOL: effects of orthographic and phonological long-term memory on nonword immediate serial recall

In a now-classic study Besner and Davelaar (1982) reported an advantage of pseudohomophone (PSH) over nonword recall in a visual immediate serial recall (ISR) task, which remained under articulatory suppression (AS), and interpreted the findings as indicating PSH items obtain support from stored phonological long-term memory (LTM) representations even when phonological rehearsal is disrupted. However, one key question relating to this PSH effect remains: could the results have been contaminated by a potential confound of orthographic familiarity (i.e., PSH items often look like the word they sound like)? As a result, the present study examined the impact of orthography on PSH ISR. Our findings indicate that PSH accuracy was consistently higher for items that had an orthographic similarity to the parent word, and this effect did not interact with concurrent task. We therefore argue that PSH items in ISR obtain independent support from both orthographic and phonological LTM representations. The present study demonstrates the critical impact of orthographic LTM representations on visual nonword ISR, and we suggest that this may be a fruitful avenue for further research.     

Phonological codes are used in integrating information across saccades in word identification and reading.

A major issue in reading is the extent to which phonological information is used in visual word perception. The present experiments demonstrated that phonological information acquired on 1 fixation from a word in the parafovea is used to help identify that word when it is later fixated. A homophone of a target word, when presented as a preview in the parafovea, facilitated processing of the target word seen on the next fixation more than a preview of a word matched with the homophone in visual similarity to the target word. This facilitation was observed both in the time to name an isolated target word and in the fixation time on the target word while silently reading a sentence; the preview was virtually never consciously identified in either task. Because the visual similarity of the preview to the target also plays a part in the facilitative effect on the preview, however, codes other than phonological codes are preserved across saccades.     

Evidence for right hemisphere phonology in a backward masking task

The extent to which orthographic and phonological processes are available during the initial moments of word recognition within each hemisphere is under specified, particularly for the right hemisphere. Few studies have investigated whether each hemisphere uses orthography and phonology under constraints that restrict the viewing time of words and reduce overt phonological demands. The current study used backward masking in the divided visual field paradigm to explore hemisphere differences in the availability of orthographic and phonological word recognition processes. A 20 ms and 60 ms SOA were used to track the time course of how these processes develop during pre-lexical moments of word recognition. Nonword masks varied in similarity to the target words such that there were four types: orthographically and phonologically similar, orthographically but not phonologically similar, phonologically but not orthographically similar and unrelated. The results showed the left hemisphere has access to both orthography and phonology early in the word recognition process. With more time to process the stimulus, the left hemisphere is able to use phonology which benefits word recognition to a larger extent than orthography. The right hemisphere also demonstrates access to both orthography and phonology in the initial moments of word recognition, however, orthographic similarity improves word recognition to a greater extent than phonological similarity.     

Unimpaired short-term memory and rhyme judgement in congenitally speechless individuals: Implications for the notion of “articulatory coding”

In normal adults, concurrent articulation impairs short-term memory, abolishing both the phonological similarity effect and the word length effect when visual presentation is used. It also interferes with ability to judge whether visually presented words rhyme. It is generally assumed that concurrent articulation impairs performance because it prevents people from recoding material into an articulatory form. If this is the explanation, then individuals who are congenitally speechless (anarthric) or speech-impaired (dysarthric) should show the same impairments as normal individuals who are concurrently articulating—i.e. they should have reduced memory spans, fail to show word length and phonological similarity effects in short-term memory, and find rhyme judgement difficult. These predictions were tested in a study of 48 cerebral palsied individuals: 12 anarthric, 12 dysarthric, and 24 controls individually matched to the speech-impaired subjects. There was no impairment of memory span in speech-impaired subjects, who showed normal phonological similarity and word-length effects in short-term memory. Speech-impaired subjects did not differ from their controls in ability to tell whether names of pairs of pictures rhymed. These results challenge the notion that “articulatory coding” is implicated in short-term memory and rhyme judgement and suggests that processes such as rehearsal and phonemic segmentation involve generation of a more abstract central phonological code.     

Priming vs. rhyming: orthographic and phonological representations in the left and right hemispheres

The right cerebral hemisphere has long been argued to lack phonological processing capacity. Recently, however, a sex difference in the cortical representation of phonology has been proposed, suggesting discrete left hemisphere lateralization in males and more distributed, bilateral representation of function in females. To evaluate this hypothesis and shed light on sex differences in the phonological processing capabilities of the left and right hemispheres, we conducted two experiments. Experiment 1 assessed phonological activation implicitly (masked homophone priming), testing 52 (M=25, F=27; mean age 19.23years, SD 1.64years) strongly right-handed participants. Experiment 2 subsequently assessed the explicit recruitment of phonology (rhyme judgement), testing 50 (M=25, F=25; mean age 19.67years, SD 2.05years) strongly right-handed participants. In both experiments the orthographic overlap between stimulus pairs was strictly controlled using DICE [Brew, C., & McKelvie, D. (1996). Word-pair extraction for lexicography. In K. Oflazer & H. Somers (Eds.), Proceedings of the second international conference on new methods in language processing (pp. 45-55). Ankara: VCH], such that pairs shared (a) high orthographic and phonological similarity (e.g., not-KNOT); (b) high orthographic and low phonological similarity (e.g., pint-HINT); (c) low orthographic and high phonological similarity (e.g., use-EWES); or (d) low orthographic and low phonological similarity (e.g., kind-DONE). As anticipated, high orthographic similarity facilitated both left and right hemisphere performance, whereas the left hemisphere showed greater facility when phonological similarity was high. This difference in hemispheric processing of phonological representations was especially pronounced in males, whereas female performance was far less sensitive to visual field of presentation across both implicit and explicit phonological tasks. As such, the findings offer behavioural evidence indicating that though both hemispheres are capable of orthographic analysis, phonological processing is discretely lateralised to the left hemisphere in males, but available in both the left and right hemisphere in females.     

Contribution of articulatory rehearsal to short-term memory: evidence from a case of selective disruption.

We describe a brain-damaged patient with disturbed articulatory rehearsal in whom all predictions derived from a working memory model were fulfilled. The patient showed a reduced verbal span, no word-length effect on immediate recall in both the visual or the auditory modalities, no phonological similarity effect in the visual modality, and no effect of articulatory suppression. A slowed overt articulation rate provided independent evidence for disrupted articulatory rehearsal. The other components of working memory, the visuospatial scratch-pad, phonological storage system, and central executive, were functional. The selectivity of the deficit can be taken as evidence for the specific role of articulatory rehearsal in working memory.     

What makes words sound similar?

Although similarity plays an important role in accounts of language processing, there are surprisingly few direct empirical studies of the phonological similarity between words, and it is therefore not clear whether similarity comparisons between words involve processes similar to those involved in other cognitive domains. In five experiments, participants chose which of two monosyllabic pseudo-words sounded more similar to a target pseudo-word. Our results are generally consistent with the structural alignment theory of comparisons between complex mental representations, suggesting that phonological word similarity parallels similarity involving other kinds of information including visual objects and scenes, events, and word meanings. We use our results to test new metrics of word similarity, and identify predictions for future similarity research both in the domain of word sounds and in other cognitive domains.     

Functions of graphemic and phonemic codes in visual word-recognition

Previous investigators have argued that printed words are recognized directly from visual representations and/or phonological representations obtained through phonemic recoding. The present research tested these hypotheses by manipulating graphemic and phonemic relations within various pairs of letter strings. Ss in two experiments classified the pairs as words or nonwords. Reaction times and error rates were relatively small for word pairs (e.g., BRIBE-TRIBE) that were both graphemically, and phonemically similar. Graphemic similarity alone inhibited performance on other word pairs (e.g., COUCH-TOUCH). These and other results suggest that phonological representations play a significant role in visual word recognition and that there is a dependence between successive phonemic-encoding operations. An encoding-bias model is proposed to explain the data.