School of Psychology, University of Aberdeen, UK.
Department of Psychology, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA; Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA.
Cognition. 2020 May;198:104206. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2020.104206. Epub 2020 Feb 5.
Predictions about likely upcoming input may promote rapid language processing, but the mechanisms by which such predictions are generated remain unclear. One hypothesis is that comprehenders use their production system to covertly produce what they would say if they were the speaker. If reading predictable words involves covert production, this act might have consequences for memory. The present study capitalized on the production effect, which is the observation that words read aloud are remembered better than words read silently. Participants read sentence-final predictable and unpredictable words aloud or silently, followed by a surprise recognition memory task. If reading predictable words involves covert production, the memory improvement from actually producing the words should be smaller for predictable words than for unpredictable words. This was confirmed in Experiment 1, which tested item memory using old/new judgments. Experiment 2 followed the same procedure, except that participants now made aloud/silent judgments probing their memory for prior acts of production. Here the hypothesis was that, relative to unpredictable words, it should be more difficult to remember whether predictable words had been read aloud or silently. Indeed, word predictability tended to make it harder to tell the difference, suggesting that predictability blurred the lines between production and comprehension. Taken together, the findings support the idea that reading predictable words can involve covert production and show that this act has consequences for what readers retain.
对即将到来的输入的预测可能会促进语言的快速处理，但生成这些预测的机制仍不清楚。一种假设是，理解者使用他们的生成系统来秘密地生成他们作为说话者会说的话。如果阅读可预测的单词涉及到秘密生成，那么这个行为可能会对记忆产生影响。本研究利用了生成效应，即大声朗读的单词比默读的单词更容易被记住。参与者大声或默读句子结尾的可预测和不可预测的单词，然后进行惊喜的识别记忆任务。如果阅读可预测的单词涉及到秘密生成，那么实际生成单词所带来的记忆改善对于可预测单词应该小于不可预测单词。这在实验 1 中得到了证实，实验 1 使用旧/新判断测试项目记忆。实验 2 遵循相同的程序，只是参与者现在进行大声/默读判断，以探测他们对先前生成行为的记忆。在这里，假设是，与不可预测的单词相比，更难记住可预测的单词是大声读还是默读。事实上，单词的可预测性往往更难区分，这表明可预测性模糊了生成和理解之间的界限。总之，这些发现支持了阅读可预测单词可能涉及秘密生成的观点，并表明该行为对读者保留的内容产生了影响。
