Munro Natalie, Baker Elise, McGregor Karla, Docking Kimberly, Arculi Joanne
Discipline of Speech Pathology, University of Sydney Lidcombe, NSW, Australia.
Front Psychol. 2012 Feb 29;3:41. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00041. eCollection 2012.
Upon fast mapping, children rarely retain new words even over intervals as short as 5 min. In this study, we asked whether the memory process of encoding or consolidation is the bottleneck to retention. Forty-nine children, mean age 33 months, were exposed to eight 2- or-3-syllable nonce neighbors of words in their existing lexicons. Didactic training consisted of six exposures to each word in the context of its referent, an unfamiliar toy. Productions were elicited four times: immediately following the examiner's model, and at 1-min-, 5-min-, and multiday retention intervals. At the final two intervals, the examiner said the first syllable and provided a beat gesture highlighting target word length in syllables as a cue following any erred production. The children were highly accurate at immediate posttest. Accuracy fell sharply over the 1-min retention interval and again after an additional 5 min. Performance then stabilized such that the 5-min and multiday posttests yielded comparable performance. Given this time course, we conclude that it was not the post-encoding process of consolidation but the process of encoding itself that presented the primary bottleneck to retention. Patterns of errors and responses to cueing upon error suggested that word forms were particularly vulnerable to partial decay during the time course of encoding.
在快速映射过程中，即使间隔短至5分钟，儿童也很少能记住新单词。在本研究中，我们探讨了编码或巩固的记忆过程是否是记忆保持的瓶颈。49名平均年龄为33个月的儿童接触了他们现有词汇中八个由2或3个音节组成的无意义近音词。教学训练包括在每个单词的指代物（一个不熟悉的玩具）的情境中对每个单词进行六次接触。共进行了四次产出测试：紧跟考官示范之后，以及在1分钟、5分钟和多天的记忆间隔后。在最后两个间隔中，考官说出第一个音节，并在出现错误产出后提供一个节拍手势，突出目标单词的音节长度作为提示。儿童在即时后测时准确率很高。准确率在1分钟的记忆间隔内急剧下降，再过5分钟后再次下降。然后表现趋于稳定，以至于5分钟和多天后的测试表现相当。鉴于这个时间过程，我们得出结论，记忆保持的主要瓶颈不是巩固的编码后过程，而是编码过程本身。错误模式以及对错误提示的反应表明，在编码过程中，单词形式特别容易受到部分衰减的影响。
