University of Nebraska Omaha, Omaha, NE, USA.
University of Missouri-St. Louis, St. Louis, MO, USA.
Q J Exp Psychol (Hove). 2020 Oct;73(10):1675-1683. doi: 10.1177/1747021820921133. Epub 2020 May 24.
We examined how word length affects performance in three recognition memory experiments to resolve discrepant results in the literature for which there are theoretical implications. Shorter and longer words were equated on frequency, orthographic similarity, age of acquisition, and imageability. In Experiments 1 and 2, orthographic length (i.e., the number of letters in a word) was negatively related to hits minus false alarms. In Experiment 3, recognition performance did not differ between one- and two-syllable words that were equated on orthographic length. These results are compatible with single-process item-noise models that represent orthography in terms of features and in which memory representation strength is a product of the probabilities that the individual features have been stored. Longer words are associated with noisier representations than shorter words.
我们通过三个识别记忆实验来检验词长如何影响表现，以解决文献中存在理论意义的不一致结果。我们在频率、正字法相似性、习得年龄和形象性方面使短词和长词相等。在实验 1 和实验 2 中，正字法长度（即单词的字母数）与击中率减去虚报率呈负相关。在实验 3 中，在正字法长度相等的单音节词和双音节词之间，识别性能没有差异。这些结果与单过程项目噪声模型一致，该模型根据特征来表示正字法，并且记忆表示强度是存储各个特征的概率的产物。长词比短词具有更嘈杂的表示。
