Zhou Jifan, Lee Chia-Lin, Li Kuei-An, Tien Yung-Hsuan, Yeh Su-Ling
Department of Psychology, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan.
Department of Psychology and Behavioral Sciences, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China.
PLoS One. 2016 Feb 18;11(2):e0149355. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0149355. eCollection 2016.
Visual crowding-the inability to see an object when it is surrounded by flankers in the periphery-does not block semantic activation: unrecognizable words due to visual crowding still generated robust semantic priming in subsequent lexical decision tasks. Based on the previous finding, the current study further explored whether unrecognizable crowded words can be temporally integrated into a phrase. By showing one word at a time, we presented Chinese four-word idioms with either a congruent or incongruent ending word in order to examine whether the three preceding crowded words can be temporally integrated to form a semantic context so as to affect the processing of the ending word. Results from both behavioral (Experiment 1) and Event-Related Potential (Experiment 2 and 3) measures showed congruency effect in only the non-crowded condition, which does not support the existence of unconscious multi-word integration. Aside from four-word idioms, we also found that two-word (modifier + adjective combination) integration-the simplest kind of temporal semantic integration-did not occur in visual crowding (Experiment 4). Our findings suggest that integration of temporally separated words might require conscious awareness, at least under the timing conditions tested in the current study.
视觉拥挤效应——当一个物体被周边的侧翼干扰物包围时就无法看见该物体——并不会阻碍语义激活：因视觉拥挤效应而无法辨认的单词在随后的词汇判断任务中仍然会产生强烈的语义启动效应。基于之前的研究发现，当前的研究进一步探究了无法辨认的拥挤单词是否能够在时间上整合到一个短语中。我们每次只呈现一个单词，展示了结尾单词语义一致或不一致的中文四字成语，以检验前面三个拥挤单词是否能够在时间上整合起来形成一个语义语境，从而影响结尾单词的加工处理。行为测量（实验1）以及事件相关电位测量（实验2和3）的结果均表明，只有在非拥挤条件下才会出现语义一致性效应，这并不支持无意识的多词整合的存在。除了四字成语之外，我们还发现双词（修饰语 + 形容词组合）整合——最简单的时间语义整合类型——在视觉拥挤效应中也不会发生（实验4）。我们的研究结果表明，至少在当前研究测试的时间条件下，时间上分离的单词的整合可能需要有意识的觉知。
