Amenta Simona, Crepaldi Davide
MoMo Lab, Department of Psychology, University of Milano-Bicocca Milan, Italy.
Front Psychol. 2012 Jul 12;3:232. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00232. eCollection 2012.
The last 40 years have witnessed a growing interest in the mechanisms underlying the visual identification of complex words. A large amount of experimental data has been amassed, but although a growing number of studies are proposing explicit theoretical models for their data, no comprehensive theory has gained substantial agreement among scholars in the field. We believe that this is due, at least in part, to the presence of several controversial pieces of evidence in the literature and, consequently, to the lack of a well-defined set of experimental facts that any theory should be able to explain. With this review, we aim to delineate the state of the art in the research on the visual identification of complex words. By reviewing major empirical evidences in a number of different paradigms such as lexical decision, word naming, and masked and unmasked priming, we were able to identify a series of effects that we judge as reliable or that were consistently replicated in different experiments, along with some more controversial data, which we have tried to resolve and explain. We concentrated on behavioral and electrophysiological studies on inflected, derived, and compound words, so as to span over all types of complex words. The outcome of this work is an analytical summary of well-established facts on the most relevant morphological issues, such as regularity, morpheme position coding, family size, semantic transparency, morpheme frequency, suffix allomorphy, and productivity, morphological entropy, and morpho-orthographic parsing. In discussing this set of benchmark effects, we have drawn some methodological considerations on why contrasting evidence might have emerged, and have tried to delineate a target list for the construction of a new all-inclusive model of the visual identification of morphologically complex words.
在过去的40年里，人们对复杂单词视觉识别背后的机制越来越感兴趣。大量的实验数据已经积累起来，然而，尽管越来越多的研究为其数据提出了明确的理论模型，但在该领域的学者中，还没有一个全面的理论得到广泛认可。我们认为，这至少部分是由于文献中存在一些有争议的证据，因此，缺乏一套明确的实验事实，而任何理论都应该能够解释这些事实。通过这篇综述，我们旨在勾勒出复杂单词视觉识别研究的现状。通过回顾词汇判断、单词命名以及掩蔽和非掩蔽启动等多种不同范式中的主要实证证据，我们能够识别出一系列我们认为可靠的效应，或者在不同实验中得到一致重复的效应，以及一些更具争议性的数据，我们试图对这些数据进行解析和解释。我们专注于对屈折词、派生词和复合词的行为和电生理研究，以便涵盖所有类型的复杂单词。这项工作的成果是对最相关形态学问题的既定事实的分析总结，这些问题包括规则性、词素位置编码、词族大小、语义透明度、词素频率、后缀变体、生产率、形态熵以及形态正字法解析。在讨论这组基准效应时，我们对为什么会出现对比性证据进行了一些方法论上的思考，并试图勾勒出一个目标清单，以构建一个新的、涵盖所有方面的形态复杂单词视觉识别模型。
