Amenta Simona, Marelli Marco, Crepaldi Davide
Department of Psychology, University of Milano-Bicocca.
Centre for Mind/Brain Sciences, University of Trento.
J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn. 2015 Sep;41(5):1587-96. doi: 10.1037/xlm0000104. Epub 2015 Feb 9.
In this eye-tracking study, we investigated how semantics inform morphological analysis at the early stages of visual word identification in sentence reading. We exploited a feature of several derived Italian words, that is, that they can be read in a "morphologically transparent" way or in a "morphologically opaque" way according to the sentence context to which they belong. This way, each target word was embedded in a sentence eliciting either its transparent or opaque interpretation. We analyzed whether the effect of stem frequency changes according to whether the (very same) word is read as a genuine derivation (transparent context) versus as a pseudoderived word (opaque context). Analysis of the first fixation durations revealed a stem-word frequency effect in both opaque and transparent contexts, thus showing that stems were accessed whether or not they contributed to word meaning, that is, word decomposition is indeed blind to semantics. However, while the stem-word frequency effect was facilitatory in the transparent context, it was inhibitory in the opaque context, thus showing an early involvement of semantic representations. This pattern of data is revealed by words with short suffixes. These results indicate that derived and pseudoderived words are segmented into their constituent morphemes also in natural reading; however, this blind-to-semantics process activates morpheme representations that are semantically connoted.
在这项眼动追踪研究中，我们调查了在句子阅读中视觉单词识别的早期阶段语义如何影响形态分析。我们利用了几个派生意大利语单词的一个特点，即根据它们所属的句子语境，它们可以以“形态透明”的方式或“形态不透明”的方式被阅读。这样，每个目标单词都被嵌入到一个句子中，引发其透明或不透明的解读。我们分析了词干频率的影响是否会根据（完全相同的）单词被解读为真正的派生词（透明语境）还是伪派生词（不透明语境）而发生变化。对首次注视持续时间的分析显示，在不透明和透明语境中都存在词干-单词频率效应，这表明无论词干是否对单词意义有贡献，词干都会被提取，也就是说，单词分解确实对语义不敏感。然而，虽然词干-单词频率效应在透明语境中起促进作用，但在不透明语境中起抑制作用，从而表明语义表征在早期就参与其中。这种数据模式是由后缀较短的单词揭示的。这些结果表明，在自然阅读中，派生词和伪派生词也会被分解为它们的组成语素；然而，这种对语义不敏感的过程会激活带有语义内涵的语素表征。
