词汇识别中歧义词素语义加工:ERP研究

结合掩蔽启动范式和ERP技术,利用歧义词素的加工,本研究探讨了歧义词素语义的激活。实验采用3×2两因素被试内设计,歧义词素两含义互为启动刺激和目标刺激,两变量分别为启动词类型(歧义词素含义1 vs.含义2 vs.无关词)和目标词类型(歧义词素含义1 vs.含义2)。行为结果发现启动词类型和目标词类型存在交互作用,即只有当共享词素同形同义的情况下,目标词的加工才可能被启动,共享词素同形不同义时并没有产生启动效应。ERP结果进一步肯定了行为结果,在N250和N400两个脑电成分上都发现了启动类型和目标类型交互作用有关的效应,当启动词和目标词共享词素同形同义时,同时引发了N250和N400的变化;当共享词素同形不同义时,时程分析时虽然也发现了N250的变化,但是N250的效应较小,小于同形同义所引发的N250效应,持续时间也较短。实验结果说明,在词汇识别中歧义词素语义可以激活,并对目标词汇加工的早期加工阶段发挥作用。     

Inhibitory neighbor priming effects in eye movements during reading

We report an eye movement experiment investigating whether prior processing of a word’s orthographic neighbor in a sentence influences subsequent word processing during reading. There was greater difficulty in early word processing when a target word’s neighbor rather than a control word appeared earlier in a sentence; this effect was uninfluenced by the relative lexical frequency of the word and its neighbor. We discuss this inhibitory neighbor priming effect in terms of competitive network models of word recognition and the process of lexical identification in the E-Z Reader model of oculomotor control (e.g., Reichle, Pollatsek, Fisher, & Rayner, 1998).     

The interaction of meaning and sound in spoken word recognition

Models of spoken word recognition vary in the ways in which they capture the relationship between speech input and meaning. Modular accounts prohibit a word’s meaning from affecting the computation of its form-based representation, whereas interactive models allow activation at the semantic level to affect phonological processing. We tested these competing hypotheses by manipulating word familiarity and imageability, using lexical decision and repetition tasks. Responses to high-imageability words were significantly faster than those to low-imageability words. Repetition latencies were also analyzed as a function of cohort variables, revealing a significant imageability effect only for words that were members of large cohorts, suggesting that when the mapping from phonology to semantics is difficult, semantic information can help the discrimination process. Thus, these data support interactive models of spoken word recognition.     

Phonological representation of words in working memory during sentence reading

The temporal dynamics of a visual target word’s phonological representation was examined by presentation of an irrelevant spoken companion word when the participant’s eyes reached the target’s location during sentence reading. The spoken word was identical, similar, or dissimilar to the phonological specification of the visual target. All spoken words increased the time spent viewing the target, with larger effects in thesimilar anddissimilar spoken word conditions than in theidentical condition. The reading of posttarget text was disrupted when the spoken word was similar but not when it was identical or dissimilar to the target. Phonological interference indicates that a word’s phonological representation remains active after it has been identified during sentence reading.     

Repetition and form priming interact with neighborhood density at a brief stimulus onset asynchrony

The relationships between repetition- and form-priming effects and neighborhood density were analyzed in two masked priming experiments with the lexical decision task. Given that form-priming effects appear to be influenced by a word’s orthographic neighborhood, it is theoretically important to find out whether repetition priming also differs as a function of the word’s orthographic neighborhood. Within an activation framework, repetition- and form-priming effects are just quantitatively different phenomena, whereas the two effects are qualitatively different in a serial-ordered model of lexical access (theentry-opening model). The results show that repetition- and form-priming effects were stronger forhermit words than for words with many neighbors. These results pose some problems for both activation and serial-ordered models. The implications of these results for determining how neighbors affect the identification of a word are discussed.     

首、尾语素频率对中级印尼汉语学习者复合词识别的影响

通过词汇判断任务,探讨语素频率对中级印尼汉语学习者复合词识别的影响。研究结果发现,语素频率影响中级印尼汉语学习者复合词的识别。同时,语素频率对词汇识别的影响受到语素位置的调节。当语素为复合词的首语素时,语素频率高,词汇判断的正确率高;语素频率低,词汇判断的正确率低。当语素为复合词的尾语素时,语素频率对词汇判断正确率的影响受到首语素频率的限制。只有当首语素的频率高时,尾语素的频率才会影响词汇判断的正确率。当首语素的频率低时,尾语素的频率不影响词汇判断的正确率。研究结果支持中级印尼汉语学习者在复合词的表征中产生了语素表征,而且首语素的频率在复合词识别中发挥更重要的作用。     

Testing the Role of Phonology in Reading: Focus on Sentence Processing

Most reading research investigating the role of phonology in word recognition has focused on studies employing an individual word as the sole stimulus. The bulk of such research has offered support for the phonological recoding hypothesis, the conjecture that access to a printed word’s meaning requires activation of the word’s phonology (i.e., meaning is not typically activated via orthography alone). A criticism of such studies is that by presenting participants with only a single word on each experimental trial (a nonecological manipulation), participants may alter their typical strategy of reading in such a way as to artificially favor the phonological recoding hypothesis. The present study avoided a focus on single words by requiring participants to read sentences and paragraphs for comprehension. Experiment 1 showed that, in reading a paragraph of connected sentences, eliminating a letter in a word that altered the phonology was more deleterious than eliminating a letter that did. Experiment 2 focused on the reading of each sentence itself rather than on the paragraph and provided additional control conditions. The results were similar to those of Experiment 1, consistent with the phonological recoding hypothesis.     

Early locus of a linguistic variable in a fast priming task

The syllable and the morpheme are known to be important linguistic variables, but is such information involved in the early stages of word recognition? Syllable‐morpheme information was manipulated in the early stage of word naming by means of the fast priming paradigm. The letters in the prime were printed in a mixture of lower‐ and upper‐case letters. The change from lower to upper case occurred either at a syllable‐morpheme boundary, before the boundary, or after it (e.g., reTAKE, rETAKE, or retAKE) creating either an intact pair or a broken one. The target was always in lower case (e.g., retake). The results of Experiments 1 and 2 revealed that intact syllable and morpheme information facilitated word naming at a short Stimulus Onset Asynchrony (below awareness) but not at a long SOA, suggesting that the use of such information is automatic. A second set of experiments attempted to determine if syllable information alone could facilitate word processing. In Experiments 3 and 4, monomorphemic words were divided either at, before, or after the syllable boundary (e.g., rePEL, rEPEL, or repEL). The primes were all pseudomorphemic in the sense that the initial syllables could appear as a morpheme in other words (e.g., restate) but were not morphemic in the target words (e.g., repel). The second syllable was neither morphemic nor pseudomorphemic. Using the same SOAs as in Experiments 1 and 2, intact syllables were found to be facilitative at the short SOA, but not at the long SOA. Thus, the syllable plays a role in an early stage of word recognition. Whether morphemes that are not syllables are facilitative is still to be determined in this paradigm.     

Early morphological effects in reading: Evidence from parafoveal preview benefit in Hebrew

Hebrew words are composed of two interwoven morphemes: a triconsonantal root and a word pattern. We examined the role of the root morpheme in word identification by assessing the benefit of presentation of a parafoveal preview word derived from the same root as a target word. Although the letter information of the preview was not consciously perceived, a preview of a word derived from the same root morpheme as the foveal target word facilitated eye-movement measures of first-pass reading (i.e.,first fixation and gaze duration). These results are the first to demonstrate early morphological effects in the context of sentence reading in which no external task is imposed on the reader, and converge with previous findings of morphemic priming in Hebrew using the masked priming paradigm, and morphemic parafoveal preview benefit effects in a single-word identification task.     

Does a pear growl? Interference from semantic properties of orthographic neighbors

In this study, we investigated whether semantic properties of a word’s orthographic neighbors are activated during visual word recognition. In two experiments, words were presented with a property that was not true for the word itself. We manipulated whether the property was true for an orthographic neighbor of the word. Our results showed that rejection of the property was slower and less accurate when the property was true for a neighbor than when the property was not true for a neighbor. These findings indicate that semantic information is activated before orthographic processing is finished. The present results are problematic for the links model (Forster, 2006; Forster & Hector, 2002) that was recently proposed in order to bring form-first models of visual word recognition into line with previously reported findings (Forster & Hector, 2002; Pecher, Zeelenberg, & Wagenmakers, 2005; Rodd, 2004).     

The contribution of orthography to spoken word production: Evidence from Mandarin Chinese

A recent debate in the language production literature concerns the influence of a word’s orthographic information on spoken word production and the extent to which this influence is modulated by task context. In the present study, Mandarin Chinese participants produced sets of words that shared orthography (O+P−), phonology (O−P+), or orthography and phonology (O+P+), or were unrelated (O−P−), in the context of a reading, associative naming, or picture naming task. Shared phonology yielded facilitation effects in all three tasks, but only in the reading task was this phonological effect modulated by shared orthography. Shared orthography by itself (O+P−) revealed inhibitory effects in reading, but not in associative naming or in picture naming. These results suggest that a word’s orthography information influences spoken word production only in tasks that rely heavily on orthographic information.     

Morphological analysis of disrupted morphemes: Evidence from Hebrew

In concatenative languages such as English, the morphemes of a word are linked linearly so that words formed from the same base morpheme also resemble each other along orthographic dimensions. In Hebrew, by contrast, the morphemes of a word can be but are not generally concatenated. Instead, a pattern of vowels is infixed between the consonants of the root morpheme. Consequently, the shared portion of morphologically-related words in Hebrew is not always an orthographic unit. In a series of three experiments using the repetition priming task with visually presented Hebrew materials, primes that were formed from the same base morpheme and were morphologically-related to a target facilitated target recognition. Moreover, morphologically-related prime and target pairs that contained a disruption to the shared orthographic pattern showed the same pattern of facilitation as did nondisrupted pairs. That is, there was no effect over successive prime and target presentations, of disrupting the sequence of letters that constitutes the base morpheme or root. In addition, facilitation was similar across derivational, inflectional and identical primes. The conclusion of the present study is that morphological effects in word recognition are distinct from the effects of shared structure.     

Do transposed-letter similarity effects occur at a morpheme level? Evidence for morpho-orthographic decomposition

When does morphological decomposition occur in visual word recognition? An increasing body of evidence suggests the presence of early morphological processing. The present work investigates this issue via an orthographic similarity manipulation. Three masked priming lexical decision experiments were conducted to examine the transposed-letter similarity effect (e.g., jugde facilitates JUDGE more than the control jupbe) in polymorphemic and monomorphemic words. If morphological decomposition occurs at early stages of visual word recognition, we would expect an interaction with transposed-letter effects. Experiment 1 was carried out in Basque, which is an agglutinative language. The nonword primes were created by transposing two letters that either crossed the morphological boundaries of suffixes or did not. Results showed a transposed-letter effect for non-affixed words, whereas there were no signs of a transposed-letter effect across morpheme boundaries for affixed words. In Experiment 2, this issue was revisited in a non-agglutinative language (Spanish), with prefixed and suffixed word pairs. Again, results showed a significant transposed-letter effect for non-affixed words, whereas there were no signs of a transposed-letter effect across morpheme boundaries for affixed words (both prefixed words and suffixed words). Experiment 3 replicated the previous findings, and also revealed that, for polymorphemic words, transposed-letter priming effects occurred for within-morpheme transpositions. Taken together, these findings support the view that morphological decomposition operates at an early stage of visual word recognition.     

Sound-symbolism: A Piece in the Puzzle of Word Learning

Sound-symbolism is the idea that the relationship between word sounds and word meaning is not arbitrary for all words, but rather that there are subsets of words in the world’s languages for which sounds and their symbols have some degree of correspondence. The present research investigates sound-symbolism as a possible route to the learning of an unknown word’s meaning. Three studies compared the guesses that adult participants made regarding the potential meanings of sound-symbolic and non-sound symbolic obsolete words. In each study, participants were able to generate better definitions for sound-symbolic words when compared to non-sound symbolic words. Participants were also more likely to recognize the meanings of sound symbolic words. The superior performance on sound-symbolic words held even when definitions generated on the basis of sound association were eliminated. It is concluded that sound symbolism is a word property that influences word learning.     

Eye movements and morphological segmentation of compound words: There is a mouse in mousetrap

In two experiments, readers' eye movements were monitored as they read sentences containing compound words. In Experiment 1, the frequency of the first and second morpheme was manipulated in compound words of low whole word frequency. Experiment 2 compared pairs of low frequency compounds with high and low frequency first morphemes but identical second morphemes that were embedded in the same sentence frames. The results showed significant effects of the frequency of both morphemes on gaze duration and total fixation time on the compound words. Regression analyses revealed an influence of whole word frequency on the same measures. The results suggest that morphemic constituents of compound words are activated in the course of retrieving the representation of the whole compound word. The fact that the frequency effects were not confined to fixations on the morphemic constituents themselves implies that saccadic eye movements are implemented before morphemic retrieval has been completed. The results highlight the importance of developing more precise models of the perceptual processes underlying reading and how they interact with the processes involved in lexical retrieval and comprehension.     

Entropy,semantic relatedness and proximity

Although word co-occurrences within a document have been demonstrated to be semantically useful, word interactions over a local range have been largely neglected by psychologists due to practical challenges. Shannon’s (Bell Systems Technical Journal, 27, 379–423, 623–665, 1948) conceptualization of information theory suggests that these interactions should be useful for understanding communication. Computational advances make an examination of local word–word interactions possible for a large text corpus. We used Brants and Franz’s (2006) dataset to generate conditional probabilities for 62,474 word pairs and entropy calculations for 9,917 words in Nelson, McEvoy, and Schreiber’s (Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers, 36, 402–407, 2004) free association norms. Semantic associativity correlated moderately with the probabilities and was stronger when the two words were not adjacent. The number of semantic associates for a word and the entropy of a word were also correlated. Finally, language entropy decreases from 11 bits for single words to 6 bits per word for four-word sequences. The probabilities and entropies discussed here are included in the supplemental materials for the article.     

Morphological effects in children word reading: A priming study in fourth graders

A growing corpus of evidence suggests that morphology could play a role in reading acquisition, and that young readers could be sensitive to the morphemic structure of written words. In the present experiment, we examined whether and when morphological information is activated in word recognition. French fourth graders made visual lexical decisions to derived words preceded by primes sharing either a morphological or an orthographic relationship with the target. Results showed significant and equivalent facilitation priming effects in cases of morphologically and orthographically related primes at the shortest prime duration, and a significant facilitation priming effect in the case of only morphologically related primes at the longer prime duration. Thus, these results strongly suggest that a morphological level is involved in children's visual word recognition, although it is not distinct from the formal one at an early stage of word processing.     

多词素词的通达表征:分解还是整体

有关通达表征的结构主要有三种观点词素、整词和混合的观点.分解存储的通达表征认为,在通达表征层次中只有不可再分的词素,而没有彼此独立的词条.也就是说,词语是以词素分解形式存储在通达表征中的.整词存储的通达表征认为,在通达表征中存储的都是整词,每一个词都有其独立的词条.混合的通达表征认为词素和整词都有可能是通达表征中的单元.它具有更大的灵活性.综合考虑已有的文献和进一步的理解思考,作者提出影响词语通达表征的两个因素语义透明度和词频.     

Morphemes in their place: Evidence for position-specific identification of suffixes

Previous research strongly suggests that morphologically complex words are recognized in terms of their constituent morphemes. A question thus arises as to how the recognition system codes for morpheme position within words, given that it needs to distinguish morphological anagrams like overhang and hangover. The present study focused specifically on whether the recognition of suffixes occurs in a position-specific fashion. Experiments 1 and 2 revealed that morphologically complex nonwords (gasful ) are rejected more slowly than orthographic controls (gasfil ) but that the same interference effect is not present when the morphemic constituents are reversed ( fulgas vs. filgas). Experiment 3 went further in demonstrating that reversing the morphemes within words (e.g., nesskind) does not yield morpheme interference effects against orthographic controls (e.g., nusskind). These results strongly suggest that suffix identification is position specific, which imposes important constraints on the further development of models of morphological processing.     

A contingent speech technique in eye movement research on reading

A novel eye-movement-contingent method is presented. It builds on and extends established eye-movement-contingent visual display change methods in that it uses movements of the eyes to control the presentation of acoustic information during sentence reading. In one implementation, an irrelevant spoken word is presented when the eyes cross a predetermined spatial boundary before they move on to a selected visual target word. The relationship between the spoken word and the visual target is manipulated, and the pattern of interference, caused by the presentation of the spoken word, is used to determine the nature and time course of activated representations. Results from three recently completed experiments in which the technique was used show that a word’s phonological code remains active after it has been read and that the activated code has speech-like properties.