Università Lumsa, 00193 Roma, Italy.
Neuropsychologia. 2010 Jun;48(7):2140-6. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2010.04.005. Epub 2010 Apr 10.
English and German readers have been shown to mark a position to the left of the true centre as the subjective midpoint in word bisection. This effect resembles a well-known phenomenon observed with the bisection of solid lines (pseudoneglect), although this behavioural similarity does not imply a common origin. The purpose of the present study was twofold: on the one hand, to investigate the perceptual and lexical features that influence the bisection of Italian orthographic strings and, on the other hand, to investigate whether identical or partially independent processing mediate bisection of line and orthographic stimuli. Five experiments were carried out to explore to what extent stimulus type (lines, words, pseudowords, consonant strings, symbols), stimulus length (from 3 to 13 characters), list context (pure and mixed), and written word frequency (high and low) affected the bisection performance. The results showed that list context modulated the processing similarities across different materials and that word frequency failed to influence the magnitude of the bisection bias. More critically, across all five experiments, the results showed different effects for solid lines versus orthographic material. Lines were always bisected to the left, independent of length and list context. By contrast, a crossover effect emerged with orthographic material; for long stimuli (above five letters) the bias was consistently to the left, while short stimuli showed a consistent rightward bias. The results indicate that manual bisection involved partly different cognitive mechanisms during word and line perception and that this may depend on the characteristics of the stimuli (words/discrete vs. lines/continuous).
英语和德语读者在单词二分法中，会将位于真实中心左侧的位置标记为主观中心点。这种效应类似于在实线二分法中观察到的一种著名现象（伪忽视），尽管这种行为上的相似性并不意味着它们有共同的起源。本研究的目的有两个：一方面，研究影响意大利正字法字符串二分法的感知和词汇特征；另一方面，研究直线和正字法刺激的二分法是否由相同或部分独立的加工介导。进行了五项实验来探讨刺激类型（直线、单词、伪词、辅音串、符号）、刺激长度（3 到 13 个字符）、列表上下文（纯和混合）和书面单词频率（高和低）在多大程度上影响了二分法表现。结果表明，列表上下文调节了不同材料之间的加工相似性，而单词频率未能影响二分法偏差的大小。更重要的是，在所有五项实验中，直线与正字法材料的结果显示出不同的影响。直线始终向左二分，与长度和列表上下文无关。相比之下，在正字法材料中出现了交叉效应；对于长刺激（超过五个字母），偏差始终向左，而短刺激则表现出一致的向右偏差。结果表明，手动二分法在单词和直线感知过程中涉及部分不同的认知机制，这可能取决于刺激的特征（单词/离散与直线/连续）。
