Department of Cognitive Science, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093-0515, United States.
Cognition. 2010 Aug;116(2):289-96. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2010.05.004. Epub 2010 Jun 1.
Humans have the remarkable capacity to learn words from a single instance. The goal of this study was to examine the impact of initial learning context on the understanding of novel word usage using event-related brain potentials. Participants saw known and unknown words in strongly or weakly constraining sentence contexts. After each sentence context, word usage knowledge was assessed via plausibility ratings of these words as the objects of transitive verbs. Plausibility effects were observed in the N400 component to the verb only when the upcoming novel word object had initially appeared in a strongly constraining context. These results demonstrate that rapid word learning is modulated by contextual constraint and reveal a rapid mental process that is sensitive to novel word usage.
人类具有从单个实例中学习单词的非凡能力。本研究的目的是使用事件相关脑电位来检查初始学习环境对新单词用法理解的影响。参与者在强或弱约束的句子语境中看到了已知和未知的单词。在每个句子语境之后,通过对这些单词作为及物动词的对象的可接受性评分来评估单词用法知识。只有当即将出现的新单词对象最初出现在强约束语境中时,动词的 N400 成分才会出现可接受性效应。这些结果表明,快速单词学习受到语境约束的调节,并揭示了一种对新单词用法敏感的快速心理过程。