Derraugh Lesley S, Neath Ian, Surprenant Aimée M, Beaudry Olivia, Saint-Aubin Jean
Department of Psychology, Memorial University of Newfoundland.
École de psychologie, Université de Moncton.
Can J Exp Psychol. 2017 Mar;71(1):23-31. doi: 10.1037/cep0000098. Epub 2016 Jun 9.
The word-length effect, the finding that lists of short words are better recalled than lists of long words, is 1 of the 4 benchmark phenomena that guided development of the phonological loop component of working memory. However, previous work has noted a confound in word-length studies: The short words used had more orthographic neighbors (valid words that can be made by changing a single letter in the target word) than long words. The confound is that words with more neighbors are better recalled than otherwise comparable words with fewer neighbors. Two experiments are reported that address criticisms of the neighborhood-size account of the word-length effect by (1) testing 2 new stimulus sets, (2) using open rather than closed pools of words, and (3) using stimuli from a language other than English. In both experiments, words from large neighborhoods were better recalled than words from small neighborhoods. The results add to the growing number of studies demonstrating the substantial contribution of long-term memory to what have traditionally been identified as working memory tasks. The data are more easily explained by models incorporating the concept of redintegration rather than by frameworks such as the phonological loop that posit decay offset by rehearsal. (PsycINFO Database Record
词长效应是指短词列表比长词列表更容易被回忆起来，它是指导工作记忆语音回路成分发展的四个基准现象之一。然而，先前的研究指出了词长研究中的一个混淆因素：所使用的短词比长词有更多的正字法邻词（通过改变目标词中的一个字母就能形成的有效词）。这个混淆因素在于，邻词较多的词比其他类似但邻词较少的词更容易被回忆起来。本文报告了两项实验，通过（1）测试两组新的刺激集，（2）使用开放而非封闭的词库，以及（3）使用英语以外的语言的刺激来回应针对词长效应邻域大小解释的批评。在这两项实验中，来自大邻域的词比来自小邻域的词更容易被回忆起来。这些结果进一步证明了长期记忆对传统上被认为是工作记忆任务的重大贡献。与通过诸如语音回路这种认为复述能抵消衰退的框架相比，包含再整合概念的模型更容易解释这些数据。（《心理学文摘数据库记录》 ）
