Key Laboratory of Brain Functional Genomics- (Ministry of Education & Science and Technology Commission of Shanghai Municipality), Affiliated Mental Health Center, ECNU Shanghai Changning Mental Health Center, School of Psychology and Cognitive Science, East China Normal University, Shanghai 200062, China.
NYU-ECNU Institute of Brain and Cognitive Science at New York University Shanghai, Shanghai 200062, China.
eNeuro. 2020 Jun 11;7(3). doi: 10.1523/ENEURO.0425-19.2020. Print 2020 May/Jun.
Chunking in language comprehension is a process that segments continuous linguistic input into smaller chunks that are in the reader's mental lexicon. Effective chunking during reading facilitates disambiguation and enhances efficiency for comprehension. However, the chunking mechanisms remain elusive, especially in reading, given that information arrives simultaneously yet the written systems may not have explicit cues for labeling boundaries such as Chinese. What are the mechanisms of chunking that mediates the reading of the text that contains hierarchical information? We investigated this question by manipulating the lexical status of the chunks at distinct levels in four-character Chinese strings, including the two-character local chunk and four-character global chunk. Male and female human participants were asked to make lexical decisions on these strings in a behavioral experiment, followed by a passive reading task when their electroencephalography (EEG) was recorded. The behavioral results showed that the lexical decision time of lexicalized two-character local chunks was influenced by the lexical status of the four-character global chunk, but not vice versa, which indicated the processing of global chunks possessed priority over the local chunks. The EEG results revealed that familiar lexical chunks were detected simultaneously at both levels and further processed in a different temporal order, the onset of lexical access for the global chunks was earlier than that of local chunks. These consistent results suggest a two-stage operation for chunking in reading, the simultaneous detection of familiar lexical chunks at multiple levels around 100 ms followed by recognition of chunks with global precedence.
语言理解中的组块是将连续的语言输入分割成较小的组块的过程，这些组块在读者的心理词典中。阅读时有效的组块有助于消除歧义，提高理解效率。然而，组块机制仍然难以捉摸，尤其是在阅读中，因为信息是同时到达的，而书写系统可能没有明确的边界标记，比如中文。那么，在阅读包含层次信息的文本时，是什么机制介导了组块呢？我们通过在四字汉语字符串中操纵不同层次的词汇状态来研究这个问题，包括双字本地组块和四字全局组块。男性和女性人类参与者在一项行为实验中对这些字符串进行词汇判断，然后在记录他们的脑电图（EEG）时进行被动阅读任务。行为结果表明，词汇化的双字本地组块的词汇判断时间受到四字全局组块词汇状态的影响，但反之则不然，这表明全局组块的处理优先于本地组块。脑电图结果表明，熟悉的词汇组块在两个层次上同时被检测，并以不同的时间顺序进一步处理，全局组块的词汇访问开始时间早于本地组块。这些一致的结果表明，阅读中的组块操作有两个阶段，在 100ms 左右同时检测多个层次上的熟悉词汇组块，然后识别具有全局优先级的组块。
