Heine Angela, Tamm Sascha, Hofmann Markus, Hutzler Florian, Jacobs Arthur M
Department of Psychology, Freie Universität Berlin, Habelschwerdter Allee 45, 12043 Berlin, Germany.
Neurosci Lett. 2006 May 29;400(1-2):7-12. doi: 10.1016/j.neulet.2006.02.006. Epub 2006 Feb 28.
Behavioral studies investigating the influence of the relative word frequency of antecedent nouns on the processing of anaphoric pronouns have yielded contradictory results. While some researchers found no effect of an antecedent's frequency of occurrence on coreference resolution [J. Simner, R. Smyth, Phonological activation in anaphoric lexical access (ALA), Brain Lang. 68 (1999) 40-45], others report shorter reading times for pronouns referring to low compared to high frequency nouns [R.G.P. van Gompel, A. Majid, Antecedent frequency effects during the processing of pronouns, Cognition 90 (2004) 255-264]. Using event-related potentials, our study aimed to further investigate the issue. Participants were presented with sentence pairs, of which the first contained either a high frequency, a middle frequency or a low frequency noun. The second sentence contained a pronoun which referred back to the noun in the first sentence. ERP waves were determined, time-locked to both the nouns and the anaphoric pronouns. We observed a graded N400 effect for antecedents of the three frequency classes with amplitudes reversely related to the word's lexical frequency. Coreferential pronouns elicited a P300, with amplitudes dependent on the noun's relative frequency of occurrence, i.e. the lower the antecedent's word frequency, the higher was the amplitude of the P300. This amplitude effect at the pronoun is interpreted in terms of the allocation of attentional resources to salient discourse entities.
研究先行名词的相对词频对指代性代词处理影响的行为学研究得出了相互矛盾的结果。虽然一些研究人员发现先行词的出现频率对共指消解没有影响[J. 西姆纳，R. 史密斯，指代性词汇通达中的语音激活（ALA），《大脑与语言》68（1999）40 - 45]，但另一些研究报告称，与高频名词相比，指代低频名词的代词阅读时间更短[R.G.P. 范·贡佩尔，A. 马吉德，代词处理过程中的先行词频率效应，《认知》90（2004）255 - 264]。本研究使用事件相关电位，旨在进一步探究这一问题。向参与者呈现句子对，其中第一个句子包含高频、中频或低频名词。第二个句子包含一个指代第一个句子中名词的代词。确定与名词和指代性代词时间锁定的ERP波。我们观察到三个频率类别的先行词呈现出分级的N400效应，其波幅与单词的词汇频率呈反向相关。共指代词引发了一个P300，其波幅取决于名词的相对出现频率，即先行词的词频越低，P300的波幅越高。代词处的这种波幅效应被解释为注意力资源向显著话语实体的分配。
