Department of Psychology, University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta, Canada.
Mem Cognit. 2012 Jan;40(1):1-7. doi: 10.3758/s13421-011-0137-5.
Competitive Scrabble is an activity that involves extraordinary word recognition experience. We investigated whether that experience is associated with exceptional behavior in the laboratory in a classic visual word recognition paradigm: the lexical decision task (LDT). We used a version of the LDT that involved horizontal and vertical presentation and a concreteness manipulation. In Experiment 1, we presented this task to a group of undergraduates, as these participants are the typical sample in word recognition studies. In Experiment 2, we compared the performance of a group of competitive Scrabble players with a group of age-matched nonexpert control participants. The results of a series of cognitive assessments showed that the Scrabble players and control participants differed only in Scrabble-specific skills (e.g., anagramming). Scrabble expertise was associated with two specific effects (as compared to controls): vertical fluency (relatively less difficulty judging lexicality for words presented in the vertical orientation) and semantic deemphasis (smaller concreteness effects for word responses). These results suggest that visual word recognition is shaped by experience, and that with experience there are efficiencies to be had even in the adult word recognition system.
竞技拼字游戏是一项需要非凡单词识别经验的活动。我们研究了这种经验是否与经典视觉单词识别范式——词汇判断任务（LDT）中的特殊行为有关。我们使用了一种涉及水平和垂直呈现以及具体性操作的 LDT 版本。在实验 1 中，我们向一组本科生呈现了这个任务，因为这些参与者是单词识别研究中的典型样本。在实验 2 中，我们将一组竞技拼字游戏玩家与一组年龄匹配的非专家对照组进行了比较。一系列认知评估的结果表明，拼字游戏玩家和对照组参与者仅在拼字游戏特定技能（例如，字谜）上有所不同。拼字游戏专业知识与两个特定的效应相关联（与对照组相比）：垂直流畅性（对于以垂直方向呈现的单词，判断词汇性的相对难度较小）和语义弱化（对于单词反应，具体性效应较小）。这些结果表明，视觉单词识别受到经验的塑造，并且即使在成人单词识别系统中，经验也会带来效率。
