汉语音节累积词频对同音字听觉词汇表征的激活作用

汉语同音字音节的累积词频是同音单字词的具体词频之和, 即音节作为词被听到的频数, 也称为音节词频。它对词汇通达的作用还没获得一致看法。本文探讨听觉词汇通达中同音字表征的激活如何受累积词频的影响, 构成累积词频的具体词频和同音字数又会在其中起何作用。研究采用跨通道的音-字同音判断范式和配套的协方差分析分离出听觉的词汇表征激活作用。实验1固定同音字数, 同时变化累积词频和具体词频(其中具体高、低频同时也是同音字族内的高、低频), 结果发现具体词频的提高对表征激活有积极作用; 累积词频的提高仅在错误率上产生微弱的抑制作用, 而这个微弱作用可以归结为同音字族内高频字表征的激活对低频字表征的抑制。实验2固定具体词频, 同时变化累积词频和同音字数, 结果发现同音字数增加对表征激活产生抑制, 没有发现累积词频的作用。两个实验的结果说明, 音节累积词频对同音字的听觉词汇表征激活不起确定作用, 能够起作用的是同音字族内的具体词频和同音字数; 但同音字数变化的抑制作用仅在具体词频不变时才发生, 因此起决定作用的是同音字族内高频字表征激活和低频字表征抑制的机制。

Influence of Cumulative Frequencies of Chinese Syllables on the Activation of Homophone Representation in Auditory Lexical Access

The cumulative frequency of a homophone syllable in Chinese is the summation of the specific frequencies of one-character words within the homophone family. It is the frequency of a syllable heard as a word and is thus called the syllable frequency. So far, there has been no consensus on its effect on lexical access. The aim of this study was to explore the influence of cumulative frequencies on the activation of homophone representation in auditory lexical access of syllables. The roles of specific frequencies of homophones and the homophone family sizes, which make up the cumulative frequencies, were also investigated. The study adapted a cross-modality paradigm, homophonic sound-character matching, together with a visual lexical decision task and ANCOVA, to separate the effect of the activation of representation in auditory lexical access from the whole response. In Experiment 1, the cumulative frequency and the specific frequency were designed to vary while the homophone family size was fixed. The higher and lower word frequencies within each homophone family served as the higher and lower specific frequencies. The results indicated that increasing the specific frequency facilitated the activation of representation. Increasing the cumulative frequency only elicited a weak inhibitory effect on error rates, which may be attributed to the representation inhibition of lower frequency words caused by the representation activation for higher frequency words within homophone families. In Experiment 2, the cumulative frequency and the homophone family size were designed to vary while the specific frequency was fixed. The results indicated that increasing the homophone family size inhibited the activation of representation, while the effect of cumulative frequency was absent. The results of the two experiments suggest that the influence of cumulative frequencies of Chinese syllables on the activation of homophone representation in auditory lexical access is indefinite. Instead, the activation of representation can be influenced by the specific frequencies and the homophone family sizes. Moreover, the inhibitory effect of homophone family size could only be seen when the specific frequency is fixed. The conclusive influence is determined by the mechanism for the representation activation of higher frequency words and the representation inhibition of lower frequency words within homophone families.