Department of Psychology, Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, OK 74078, USA.
Percept Mot Skills. 2010 Aug;111(1):141-57. doi: 10.2466/11.22.28.PMS.111.4.141-157.
The time course of semantic processing of two prenominal adjectives contained within a noun phrase was investigated. In English, the ordering of adjectives is determined by their meaning. Adjectives specifying color (e.g., red) generally follow adjectives that specify size (e.g., big) and adjectives that specify aspects of general description (e.g., young). In two experiments, reading time was measured on sentences containing a noun phrase in which the order of prenominal adjectives was varied. In Exp. 1, the adjectives specified size and color (e.g., the big red balloon vs the red big balloon). In Exp. 2, the adjectives specified general description and color (e.g., the pretty yellow dress vs the yellow pretty dress). The results of both experiments showed that the processing difficulty arising from comprehending an adjective order violation emerged before the head noun was processed, indicating that comprehenders semantically processed the meanings of prenominal adjectives prior to interpreting the meaning of the head noun.
研究了名词短语中包含的两个前置形容词的语义处理的时间进程。在英语中，形容词的顺序由它们的意思决定。指定颜色的形容词（如 red）通常位于指定大小的形容词（如 big）和指定一般描述方面的形容词（如 young）之后。在两项实验中，通过测量包含名词短语的句子的阅读时间来测量前置形容词的顺序变化。在实验 1 中，形容词指定了大小和颜色（例如，大红色气球与红色大气球）。在实验 2 中，形容词指定了一般描述和颜色（例如，漂亮的黄色连衣裙与黄色漂亮的连衣裙）。两个实验的结果都表明，理解形容词顺序违反所引起的处理困难出现在处理名词之前，这表明理解者在解释名词的意思之前就已经对前置形容词的意思进行了语义处理。
