Department of ExperimentalPsychology, University of Oxford, South Parks Road, Oxford, England.
J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn. 2011 Jan;37(1):60-76. doi: 10.1037/a0020126.
Two experiments explored learning, generalization, and the influence of semantics on orthographic processing in an artificial language. In Experiment 1, 16 adults learned to read 36 novel words written in novel characters. Posttraining, participants discriminated trained from untrained items and generalized to novel items, demonstrating extraction of individual character sounds. Frequency and consistency effects in learning and generalization showed that participants were sensitive to the statistics of their learning environment. In Experiment 2, 32 participants were preexposed to the sounds of all items (lexical phonology) and to novel definitions for half of these items (semantics). Preexposure to either lexical phonology or semantics boosted the early stages of orthographic learning relative to Experiment 1. By the end of training, facilitation was restricted to the semantic condition and to items containing low-frequency inconsistent vowels. Preexposure reduced generalization, suggesting that enhanced item-specific learning was achieved at the expense of character-sound abstraction. The authors' novel paradigm provides a new tool to explore orthographic learning. Although the present findings support the idea that semantic knowledge supports word reading processes, they also suggest that item-specific phonological knowledge is important in the early stages of learning to read.
两项实验探索了在人工语言中学习、泛化以及语义对正字法加工的影响。在实验 1 中，16 名成年人学习了用新字符书写的 36 个新单词的阅读。在培训后，参与者区分了训练过的和未训练过的项目，并泛化到新的项目，这表明他们能够提取单个字符的发音。学习和泛化中的频率和一致性效应表明，参与者对学习环境的统计数据很敏感。在实验 2 中，32 名参与者预先接触了所有项目的发音（词汇语音学）和这些项目中一半的新定义（语义）。与实验 1 相比，预先接触词汇语音学或语义学都促进了正字法学习的早期阶段。到训练结束时，促进作用仅限于语义条件和包含低频不一致元音的项目。预先接触减少了泛化，这表明在项目特异性学习方面得到了增强，而字符-声音抽象则受到了限制。作者的新范式为探索正字法学习提供了一种新工具。尽管目前的发现支持语义知识支持单词阅读过程的观点，但它们也表明，在学习阅读的早期阶段，项目特异性的语音知识很重要。
