Cognition and Perception Unit, Psychology Department, University of Waterloo, 200 University Ave W, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.
Psychol Sci. 2011 Mar;22(3):393-8. doi: 10.1177/0956797610397957. Epub 2011 Feb 1.
Frequency-of-occurrence effects (e.g., effects of word frequency or familiarity) are widely thought to arise through differences in resting levels of activation in localist input-output modules. A different account posits that these effects at least partially reflect the strength of connections between various localist modules. Given that Arabic numerals appear more frequently than their alphabetic counterparts, we contrasted reaction times to stimuli in both formats in a naming/reading-aloud task and a parity-judgment task. The script effect (the difference between reaction times to Arabic and to alphabetic formats) was large in the parity-judgment task but absent in the naming/reading-aloud task. This script-by-task interaction follows naturally from the idea that at least part of the effect of frequency of occurrence of a printed word or digit (and other instances of familiarity) resides in the strength of connections between specialized localist input-output modules and a localist semantic module. This conclusion is likely applicable across a variety of domains.
出现频率效应（例如，词频或熟悉度的影响）被广泛认为是通过局部输入-输出模块的静息激活水平的差异产生的。另一种观点认为，这些效应至少部分反映了各种局部模块之间连接的强度。鉴于阿拉伯数字比其字母形式出现的频率更高，我们在命名/朗读任务和奇偶判断任务中对比了两种格式的刺激的反应时。在奇偶判断任务中，脚本效应（阿拉伯数字和字母格式的反应时之间的差异）很大，但在命名/朗读任务中则不存在。这种脚本-任务的相互作用自然符合这样一种观点，即印刷单词或数字（以及其他熟悉程度的实例）的出现频率的至少部分效应存在于专门的局部输入-输出模块和局部语义模块之间的连接强度中。这个结论可能适用于各种不同的领域。
