Kwantes Peter J, Mewhort D J K
University of Queensland.
Can J Exp Psychol. 2002 Mar;56(1):30-40. doi: 10.1037/h0087383.
A letter string presented briefly in the parafovea facilitates naming a foveally presented word provided that the two stimuli are orthographically similar. The facilitation (called priming) is asymmetrical in that to obtain it, both letter strings must have the first letters in common. One possible explanation, a letter-integration hypothesis, proposes that readers only identify the letters at the beginning of the parafoveal stimulus, an action that facilitates processing the target. Another explanation, a word-integration hypothesis, postulates that all the letters of the parafoveal stimulus are identified and that the asymmetry occurs because the first letters of the parafoveal stimulus are weighted more heavily than the later ones. The two accounts differ in the way the position of the first letter is determined: The first postulates that readers know the side to identify first without reference to the stimulus; the second postulates that readers establish an order on the stimuli postcategorically. To distinguish the views, we presented English and Hebrew stimuli to bilingual readers. Readers could not anticipate the position of the first letters; hence, if the letter-integration explanation is correct, the asymmetry in the priming should be attenuated. Consistent with the word-integration explanation, however, priming occurred when the target shared the beginning letters with the prime in both languages.
若两个刺激在拼写上相似，那么在副中央凹短暂呈现的字母串会有助于对中央凹呈现的单词进行命名。这种促进作用（称为启动效应）是不对称的，即要获得这种效应，两个字母串必须有相同的首字母。一种可能的解释，即字母整合假说，认为读者仅识别副中央凹刺激开头的字母，这一行为有助于对目标进行加工。另一种解释，即单词整合假说，假定副中央凹刺激的所有字母都被识别，且不对称现象的出现是因为副中央凹刺激的首字母比后面的字母权重更大。这两种解释在确定首字母位置的方式上有所不同：第一种解释假定读者无需参考刺激就能知道首先要识别哪一侧的字母；第二种解释假定读者在对刺激进行分类后确定刺激的顺序。为区分这两种观点，我们向双语读者呈现了英文和希伯来文刺激。读者无法预先知道首字母的位置；因此，如果字母整合解释正确，启动效应中的不对称性应该会减弱。然而，与单词整合解释一致的是，当目标与启动刺激在两种语言中都有相同的首字母时，启动效应就会出现。
