Kinoshita Sachiko, Yu Lili, Verdonschot Rinus G, Norris Dennis
Department of Psychology and Macquarie University Centre for Reading (MQCR), Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW, 2109, Australia.
Hiroshima University, Hiroshima, Japan.
Mem Cognit. 2021 May;49(4):815-825. doi: 10.3758/s13421-020-01125-2. Epub 2021 Jan 19.
Are letters with a diacritic (e.g., â) recognized as a variant of the base letter (e.g., a), or as a separate letter identity? Two recent masked priming studies, one in French and one in Spanish, investigated this question, concluding that this depends on the language-specific linguistic function served by the diacritic. Experiment 1 tested this linguistic function hypothesis using Japanese kana, in which diacritics signal consonant voicing, and like French and unlike Spanish, provide lexical contrast. Contrary to the hypothesis, Japanese kana yielded the pattern of diacritic priming like Spanish. Specifically, for a target kana with a diacritic (e.g., ガ, /ga/), the kana prime without the diacritic (e.g., カ, /ka/) facilitated recognition almost as much as the identity prime (e.g., ガ-ガ = カ-ガ), whereas for a target kana without a diacritic, the kana prime with the diacritic produced less facilitation than the identity prime (e.g., カ-カ < ガ-カ). We suggest that the pattern of diacritic priming has little to do with linguistic function, and instead it stems from a general property of visual object recognition. Experiment 2 tested this hypothesis using visually similar letters of the Latin alphabet that differ in the presence/absence of a visual feature (e.g., O and Q). The same asymmetry in priming was observed. These findings are consistent with the noisy channel model of letter/word recognition (Norris & Kinoshita, Psychological Review, 119, 517-545, 2012a).
带有变音符（如â）的字母是被视为基本字母（如a）的变体，还是被视为一个独立的字母？最近有两项掩蔽启动研究，一项是关于法语的，一项是关于西班牙语的，对这个问题进行了调查，得出的结论是，这取决于变音符所服务的特定语言的语言功能。实验1使用日语假名对这种语言功能假设进行了测试，在日语假名中，变音符表示辅音的浊音，并且与法语一样而与西班牙语不同，提供词汇对比。与假设相反，日语假名产生了类似于西班牙语的变音符启动模式。具体来说，对于带有变音符的目标假名（如ガ，/ga/），没有变音符的假名启动（如カ，/ka/）促进识别的程度几乎与相同字母启动（如ガ - ガ = カ - ガ）一样，而对于没有变音符的目标假名，带有变音符的假名启动产生的促进作用比相同字母启动要小（如カ - カ < ガ - カ）。我们认为，变音符启动模式与语言功能关系不大，相反，它源于视觉对象识别的一个普遍特性。实验2使用拉丁字母中视觉上相似但在视觉特征的有无上存在差异的字母（如O和Q）对这一假设进行了测试。观察到了相同的启动不对称性。这些发现与字母/单词识别的噪声通道模型（诺里斯和木下，《心理学评论》，119，517 - 545，2012a）一致。
