Li Xuesong, Shu Hua, Liu Youyi, Li Ping
Beijing Normal University.
J Cogn Neurosci. 2006 Oct;18(10):1774-87. doi: 10.1162/jocn.2006.18.10.1774.
Previous psycholinguistic research has debated the nature of the mental representation of verbs and the access of relevant verb information in sentence processing. In this study, we used behavioral and electrophysiological methods to examine the representation of verbs in and out of sentence contexts. In five experiments, word naming and event-related potential (ERP) components were used to measure the speed and the amplitude, respectively, associated with different verb-object combinations that result in different degrees of fit between the verb and its object. Both naming speed and ERP amplitudes (N400) are proven to be sensitive indices of the degree of fit, varying as a function of how well the object fits the verb in terms of selectional restrictions. The results suggest that the semantic features of the verb's arguments are an integral part of the mental representation of verbs, and such information of the verb is accessed and used on-line during sentence processing. Implications of these results are discussed in light of recent computational semantic models that view the lexicon through high-order lexical co-occurrences in language use.
以往的心理语言学研究一直在探讨动词心理表征的本质以及句子加工过程中相关动词信息的提取。在本研究中，我们运用行为学和电生理学方法来考察句子语境内外动词的表征。在五个实验中，分别使用词汇命名和事件相关电位（ERP）成分来测量与不同动宾组合相关的速度和波幅，这些动宾组合在动词与其宾语之间的匹配程度上存在差异。命名速度和ERP波幅（N400）均被证明是匹配程度的敏感指标，它们会随着宾语在选择限制方面与动词的匹配程度而变化。结果表明，动词论元的语义特征是动词心理表征的一个组成部分，并且在句子加工过程中，此类动词信息会被在线提取和使用。我们根据近期通过语言使用中的高阶词汇共现来审视词汇的计算语义模型，对这些结果的意义进行了讨论。
