Tamminen Jakke, Gaskell M Gareth
Department of Psychology, University of York, York, UK.
Q J Exp Psychol (Hove). 2013;66(5):1001-25. doi: 10.1080/17470218.2012.724694. Epub 2012 Oct 4.
We sought to establish whether novel words can become integrated into existing semantic networks by teaching participants new meaningful words and then using these new words as primes in two semantic priming experiments, in which participants carried out a lexical decision task to familiar words. Importantly, at no point in training did the novel words co-occur with the familiar words that served as targets in the primed lexical decision task, allowing us to evaluate semantic priming in the absence of direct association. We found that familiar words were primed by the newly related novel words, both when the novel word prime was unmasked (experiment 1) and when it was masked (experiment 2), suggesting that the new words had been integrated into semantic memory. Furthermore, this integration was strongest after a 1-week delay and was independent of explicit recall of the novel word meanings: Forgetting of meanings did not attenuate priming. We argue that even after brief training, newly learned words become an integrated part of the adult mental lexicon rather than being episodically represented separately from the lexicon.
我们试图通过教参与者新的有意义的单词，然后在两个语义启动实验中使用这些新单词作为启动刺激，来确定新单词是否能够融入现有的语义网络。在这两个实验中，参与者对熟悉的单词执行词汇判断任务。重要的是，在训练过程中，新单词从未与在启动的词汇判断任务中作为目标的熟悉单词同时出现，这使我们能够在没有直接关联的情况下评估语义启动。我们发现，无论是新单词启动刺激未被掩盖时（实验1）还是被掩盖时（实验2），熟悉的单词都会被新的相关单词启动，这表明新单词已被整合到语义记忆中。此外，这种整合在延迟1周后最为强烈，并且与对新单词含义的明确回忆无关：对含义的遗忘并未减弱启动效应。我们认为，即使经过短暂训练，新学的单词也会成为成人心理词典的一个整合部分，而不是与词典分开以情景方式表征。
