Forster Kenneth I, Hector Jo
Department of Psychology, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona 85721, USA.
Mem Cognit. 2002 Oct;30(7):1106-17. doi: 10.3758/bf03194328.
The density of the orthographic neighborhood surrounding an item has been shown to have an inhibitory effect for nonwords in a lexical decision experiment. Four experiments are reported investigating whether a similar pattern holds for a semantic categorization task (animal vs. non-animal). In the first experiment, no effects of neighborhood density were found for nonexemplars, whether they were words or nonwords. The absence of any inhibitory effect for nonwords implies that close orthographic neighbors are ignored. However, the second experiment showed that if the nonword has a neighbor that is an animal name (eg., turple), an interference effect is observed, implying that neighbors do exert an effect if they have the right semantic properties. The same items showed no additional interference in lexical decision. These results suggest the involvement of semantic properties very early in the processing cycle. A cascaded processing system monitoring activation in semantic features can explain these results, but cannot explain the frequency effect observed for nonexemplar words or the fact that variation in density is irrelevant when one of the neighbors is an exemplar. It is argued that existing models of semantic categorization must be extended to accommodate these results.
在一项词汇判断实验中，已证明围绕一个项目的正字法邻域密度对非词具有抑制作用。本文报告了四项实验，研究在语义分类任务（动物与非动物）中是否存在类似模式。在第一个实验中，未发现邻域密度对非范例有影响，无论它们是词还是非词。对非词没有任何抑制作用，这意味着紧密的正字法邻域被忽略了。然而，第二个实验表明，如果非词有一个是动物名称的邻域（例如，turple），就会观察到干扰效应，这意味着如果邻域具有正确的语义属性，它们确实会产生影响。相同的项目在词汇判断中没有显示出额外的干扰。这些结果表明语义属性在处理周期的早期就已参与其中。一个监测语义特征激活的级联处理系统可以解释这些结果，但无法解释对非范例词观察到的频率效应，也无法解释当其中一个邻域是范例时密度变化无关紧要这一事实。有人认为，现有的语义分类模型必须加以扩展以适应这些结果。
