Vigliocco Gabriella, Vinson David P, Arciuli Joanne, Barber Horacio
Deafness, Cognition and Language Research Centre, Department of Psychology, University College London, 26 Bedford Way, London Q1 WC1H 0AP, UK.
Brain Lang. 2008 Jun;105(3):175-84. doi: 10.1016/j.bandl.2007.10.003. Epub 2007 Dec 11.
The double dissociation between noun and verb processing, well documented in the neuropsychological literature, has not been supported in imaging studies. Recent imaging studies, in fact, suggest that once confounding with semantics is eliminated, grammatical class effects only emerge as a consequence of building frames. Here we assess this hypothesis behaviorally in two visual word recognition experiments. In Experiment 1, participants made lexical decisions on verb targets. We manipulated the grammatical class of the prime words (either nouns or verbs and always introduced in a minimal phrasal context, i.e., "the+N" or "to+V"), and their semantic similarity to a target (related vs. unrelated). We found reliable effects of grammatical class, and no interaction with semantic similarity. Experiment 2 further explored this grammatical class effect, using verb targets preceded by semantically unrelated verb vs. noun primes. In one condition, prime words were presented as bare words; in the other, they were presented in the minimal phrasal context used in Experiment 1. Grammatical class effects only arose in the latter but not in the former condition thus providing evidence that word recognition does not recruit grammatical class information unless it is provided to the system.
名词和动词加工之间的双重分离在神经心理学文献中有充分记载，但在成像研究中并未得到支持。事实上，最近的成像研究表明，一旦消除与语义的混淆，语法类别效应仅作为构建框架的结果而出现。在此，我们在两项视觉单词识别实验中对这一假设进行行为学评估。在实验1中，参与者对动词目标进行词汇判断。我们操纵了启动词的语法类别（名词或动词，且总是在最小短语语境中呈现，即“the + N”或“to + V”），以及它们与目标的语义相似性（相关与不相关）。我们发现了可靠的语法类别效应，且与语义相似性没有交互作用。实验2进一步探究了这种语法类别效应，使用语义不相关的动词与名词作为启动词来启动动词目标。在一种条件下，启动词以孤立单词的形式呈现；在另一种条件下，它们以实验1中使用的最小短语语境呈现。语法类别效应仅在后一种条件下出现，而在前一种条件下未出现，从而提供了证据表明单词识别不会调用语法类别信息，除非该信息被提供给系统。
