Tsai Pei-Shu, Yu Brenda H-Y, Lee Chia-Ying, Tzeng Ovid J-L, Hung Daisy L, Wu Denise H
Institute of Neuroscience, National Yang-Ming University, Beitou, Taipei, Taiwan.
Brain Res. 2009 Feb 9;1253:149-60. doi: 10.1016/j.brainres.2008.10.080. Epub 2008 Nov 14.
The effect of concreteness has been heavily studied on nouns. However, there are scant reports on the effect for verbs. The present research independently manipulated concreteness and word class of Chinese disyllabic words in tasks that required different depths of semantic processing: a lexical decision task and a semantic relatedness judgment task. The results replicated the concreteness effect for nouns, indicating that concrete nouns elicited larger N400 responses than abstract nouns with a broad distribution over the scalp, irrespective of the task demands. Similar to the findings from English unambiguous verbs, the concreteness effect for Chinese verbs was also robustly observed from fontal to posterior electrodes in both tasks. These results suggest that when Chinese nouns and verbs are typical and unambiguous in both meanings and word classes, the similar topographic distributions of the N400 components reflect the same underlying cause(s) of the concreteness effect for these two word classes.
关于具体性对名词的影响，已有大量研究。然而，关于动词影响的报道却很少。本研究在需要不同深度语义加工的任务中，即词汇判断任务和语义相关性判断任务中，独立操纵了汉语双音节词的具体性和词类。结果重现了名词的具体性效应，表明具体名词比抽象名词引发更大的N400反应，且在头皮上分布广泛，与任务要求无关。与英语明确动词的研究结果相似，在两项任务中，从额叶到后电极都能强烈观察到汉语动词的具体性效应。这些结果表明，当汉语名词和动词在意义和词类上都典型且明确时，N400成分相似的地形图分布反映了这两类词具体性效应的相同潜在原因。
