Huang Hsu-Wen, Lee Chia-Ying, Tsai Jie-Li, Lee Chia-Lin, Hung Daisy L, Tzeng Ovid J-L
Laboratory for Cognitive Neurosciences, National Yang-Ming University, Taipei, Taiwan.
Neuroreport. 2006 Jul 17;17(10):1061-5. doi: 10.1097/01.wnr.0000224761.77206.1d.
The present study investigates the effects of neighborhood size and neighborhood frequency in reading Chinese two-character words. The neighborhood size of a word is defined as the summation of neighbors sharing the first constituent (neighborhood size 1) and the second constituent (neighborhood size 2) characters. The first experiment found two opposite neighborhood size effects in lexical decision of high-frequency and low-frequency words. The regression analysis showed that neighborhood size 1 influenced word reading more than the neighborhood size 2. The second experiment confirmed this finding and showed that reading words with higher frequency neighbors took a longer time and elicited greater N400 and LPC than those without higher frequency neighbors. These findings indicate that, when reading Chinese two-character words, all words sharing the first constituent character are activated in the early stage of word recognition and the existence of high-frequency words among neighbors leads to greater competition in the stage of semantic integration and response selection.
本研究考察了邻域大小和邻域频率对汉语双字词阅读的影响。一个词的邻域大小被定义为共享第一个成分（邻域大小1）和第二个成分（邻域大小2）字符的邻域词的总和。第一个实验在高频和低频词的词汇判断中发现了两种相反的邻域大小效应。回归分析表明，邻域大小1比邻域大小2对单词阅读的影响更大。第二个实验证实了这一发现，并表明与没有高频邻域词的情况相比，阅读有高频邻域词的单词花费的时间更长，诱发的N400和晚期正成分（LPC）更大。这些发现表明，在阅读汉语双字词时，所有共享第一个成分字符的单词在单词识别的早期阶段都会被激活，并且邻域词中高频词的存在会在语义整合和反应选择阶段导致更大的竞争。
