Young A W, Newcombe F, Hellawell D, De Haan E
Durham University, Science Laboratories, England.
Brain Cogn. 1989 Nov;11(2):186-209. doi: 10.1016/0278-2626(89)90017-1.
Three experiments investigating the patient M.S.'s semantic memory are reported. Experiments 1 and 2 involved a category-membership decision task, in which M.S. was asked to determine whether a noun was a member of a specified semantic category. His performance in Experiment 1 was impaired for nouns from living categories in comparison with nouns from nonliving categories, and this impairment was especially marked for nouns of low typicality. Experiment 2 demonstrated an equivalent pattern of very poor performance to nouns of low familiarity from living categories. In Experiment 3 the effect of a category label on lexical decision was examined, using category labels as primes preceding nouns or pronounceable nonwords. Facilitation from related category label primes was found for typical and untypical members of living and nonliving semantic categories. These findings demonstrate that M.S. has impaired knowledge of the structure of living semantic categories when explicit access to this information is required (Experiments 1 and 2), but that some form of preserved category structure can be demonstrated in tasks which assess this implicitly (Experiment 3).
本文报告了三项针对患者M.S.语义记忆的实验。实验1和实验2涉及类别成员判定任务，即要求M.S.判断一个名词是否属于特定的语义类别。与非生物类别名词相比，他在实验1中对生物类别名词的表现受损，且这种受损在典型性较低的名词中尤为明显。实验2表明，对于来自生物类别的低熟悉度名词，其表现同样非常差。在实验3中，研究了类别标签对词汇判定的影响，使用类别标签作为名词或可发音非词之前的启动刺激。发现对于生物和非生物语义类别的典型和非典型成员，相关类别标签启动刺激都有促进作用。这些发现表明，当需要明确获取此信息时，M.S.对生物语义类别的结构知识受损（实验1和2），但在隐式评估此信息的任务中，可以证明存在某种形式的保留类别结构（实验3）。
