Abrams Richard L
Department of Psychology, University of Washington, USA.
Conscious Cogn. 2005 Sep;14(3):585-601. doi: 10.1016/j.concog.2005.01.004.
The claim that visually masked, unidentifiable ("subliminal") words are analyzed at the level of whole word meaning has been challenged by recent findings indicating that instead, analysis occurs mainly at the subword level. The present experiments examined possible limits on subword analysis. Experiment 1 obtained semantic priming from pleasant- and unpleasant-meaning subliminal words in which no individual letter contained diagnostic information about a word's evaluative valence; thus analysis must operate on information more complex than that contained in individual letters. Experiments 2 and 3 showed that analysis must operate on information more complex than that represented by individual bigrams (adjacent letters) or trigrams (three consecutive letters). These findings suggest that while subliminal priming is driven by subword analysis, the effective units of analysis are distributed widely across at least short (four- and five-letter) words.
关于视觉上被遮蔽、无法识别的（“阈下”）单词在整个单词意义层面上进行分析的说法，已受到最近研究结果的挑战，这些结果表明，相反，分析主要发生在子词层面。本实验研究了子词分析可能存在的限制。实验1从具有愉悦和不愉悦意义的阈下单词中获得了语义启动效应，其中没有单个字母包含有关单词评价效价的诊断信息；因此，分析必须基于比单个字母所包含信息更复杂的信息进行操作。实验2和实验3表明，分析必须基于比单个双字母组（相邻字母）或三字母组（三个连续字母）所代表的信息更复杂的信息进行操作。这些发现表明，虽然阈下启动效应是由子词分析驱动的，但有效的分析单元广泛分布在至少短的（四字母和五字母）单词中。
