Catling J C, Dent K, Williamson S
Psychology and Health Sciences, University of Worcester, Worcester, UK.
Acta Psychol (Amst). 2008 Sep;129(1):130-7. doi: 10.1016/j.actpsy.2008.05.005. Epub 2008 Jul 2.
Four experiments examined how age of acquisition (AoA) and word frequency (WF) interact with manipulations of image quality in a picture-naming task. Experiments 1 and 2 examined the effect of overlaying the to-be-named picture with irrelevant contours. The magnitude of the AoA effect increased when the contours were added (Experiment 1), but the effect of WF remained constant (Experiment 2). Experiments 3 and 4 examined the effects of reducing the contrast of the contours defining the to-be-named picture. Both the effects of AoA (Experiment 3) and WF (Experiment 4) remained constant in the face of contrast reduction. These results provide an empirical dissociation of the effects of AoA and WF. The results are consistent with the idea that both AoA and the addition of irrelevant contours affect the efficiency of object recognition, but WF affects later processes involved in retrieval of object names. The theoretical implications of these findings in relation to accounts of AoA and frequency and their functional localisation in the lexical system are discussed.
四项实验研究了在图片命名任务中，习得年龄（AoA）和词频（WF）如何与图像质量的操控相互作用。实验1和实验2研究了用无关轮廓覆盖待命名图片的效果。添加轮廓时，AoA效应的幅度增加了（实验1），但WF效应保持不变（实验2）。实验3和实验4研究了降低定义待命名图片的轮廓对比度的效果。面对对比度降低，AoA效应（实验3）和WF效应（实验4）均保持不变。这些结果为AoA和WF的效应提供了实证性分离。结果与以下观点一致：AoA和添加无关轮廓均会影响物体识别的效率，但WF影响物体名称检索中涉及的后续过程。讨论了这些发现与AoA和频率的理论解释及其在词汇系统中的功能定位相关的理论意义。
