Ghyselinck Mandy, Lewis Michael B, Brysbaert Marc
Department of Experimental Psychology, Ghent University, Henri Dunantlaan 2, B-9000 Gent, Belgium.
Acta Psychol (Amst). 2004 Jan;115(1):43-67. doi: 10.1016/j.actpsy.2003.11.002.
Early-acquired words are processed faster than late-acquired words. This is a well-accepted effect within the word recognition literature. Different explanations have been proposed, either localizing the effect of age of acquisition (AoA) in a particular substage of word processing or seeing it as the result of the way in which information is stored and accessed in the brain in general. The cumulative-frequency hypothesis is an example of the latter type of explanation: it states that the total number of times a system has come across a particular stimulus will determine the speed with which the stimulus can be recognized. The present multi-task investigation provides a critical test of the different explanations. Results show that in a variety of word processing tasks the effects of frequency and AoA are highly correlated, and that the impact of AoA is consistently higher than would be expected on the basis of the cumulative-frequency hypothesis. The findings are interpreted as evidence for recent demonstrations of a loss of plasticity in neural networks due to training and/or for mathematical models that describe the growth of the lexico-semantic network as the attachment of new nodes to existing nodes.
早期习得的词汇比晚期习得的词汇处理速度更快。这是词汇识别文献中一个被广泛接受的效应。人们提出了不同的解释，要么将习得年龄（AoA）的效应定位在词汇处理的特定子阶段，要么将其视为大脑中信息存储和获取方式的总体结果。累积频率假说就是后一种解释类型的一个例子：它指出系统遇到特定刺激的总次数将决定识别该刺激的速度。本多任务研究对不同的解释进行了关键测试。结果表明，在各种词汇处理任务中，频率和AoA的效应高度相关，而且AoA的影响始终高于基于累积频率假说所预期的影响。这些发现被解释为神经网络因训练而丧失可塑性的最新证据，或者是将词汇语义网络的增长描述为新节点附着于现有节点的数学模型的证据。
