Research Department of Cognitive Perceptual and Brain Sciences, University College London, London, UK.
Mem Cognit. 2012 Oct;40(7):1095-108. doi: 10.3758/s13421-012-0209-1.
Changes to our everyday activities mean that adult language users need to learn new meanings for previously unambiguous words. For example, we need to learn that a "tweet" is not only the sound a bird makes, but also a short message on a social networking site. In these experiments, adult participants learned new fictional meanings for words with a single dominant meaning (e.g., "ant") by reading paragraphs that described these novel meanings. Explicit recall of these meanings was significantly better when there was a strong semantic relationship between the novel meaning and the existing meaning. This relatedness effect emerged after relatively brief exposure to the meanings (experiment 1), but it persisted when training was extended across 7 days (experiment 2) and when semantically demanding tasks were used during this extended training (experiment 3). A lexical decision task was used to assess the impact of learning on online recognition. In Experiment 3, participants responded more quickly to words whose new meaning was semantically related than to those with an unrelated meaning. This result is consistent with earlier studies showing an effect of meaning relatedness on lexical decision, and it indicates that these newly acquired meanings become integrated with participants' preexisting knowledge about the meanings of words.
我们日常生活活动的变化意味着成年语言使用者需要学习以前不明确的单词的新含义。例如，我们需要知道“tweet”不仅是鸟的叫声，也是社交网站上的一条短消息。在这些实验中，成年参与者通过阅读描述这些新含义的段落，为具有单一主导含义的单词（例如“ant”）学习新的虚构含义。当新含义与现有含义之间存在很强的语义关系时，对这些含义的明确回忆明显更好。这种关联性效应在对这些含义进行相对短暂的接触后就出现了（实验 1），但当训练延长到 7 天时（实验 2），并且在这个延长的训练过程中使用语义要求较高的任务时（实验 3），它仍然存在。词汇判断任务用于评估学习对在线识别的影响。在实验 3 中，参与者对具有语义相关性的新含义的单词的反应比具有不相关含义的单词更快。这一结果与早期研究表明语义相关性对词汇判断有影响的结果一致，这表明这些新获得的含义与参与者对单词含义的已有知识相整合。
