Dipartimento di Psicologia dello Sviluppo e della Socializzazione, Università di Padova, Via Venezia 8, 35131, Padova, Italy.
Mem Cognit. 2021 Oct;49(7):1348-1359. doi: 10.3758/s13421-021-01172-3. Epub 2021 Mar 29.
Accessing semantic information has negative consequences for successive recovering attempts of similar information. For instance, in the course of picture-naming tasks, the time required to name an object is determined by the total number of items from the same category that have already been named; naming latencies increase proportionally to the total number of semantically related words named previously. This phenomenon is called cumulative semantic cost (or interference). Two picture-naming experiments with children (4-11 years old, 229 participants) investigate whether having successfully named the previous within-category items is a necessary condition for the cumulative semantic cost to appear. We anticipated that younger children would have a larger rate of nonresponses compared with older children, reflecting the fact that younger children have not yet consolidated many lexical representations. Our results confirmed this prediction. Critically, we also observed that cumulative semantic cost was independent of having successfully retrieved previous within-category lexical items. Furthermore, picture trials for which the previous within-category item elicited a nonresponse showed the same amount of cost as those picture trials for which the previous within-category item elicited a correct naming event. Our findings indicate that it is the attempt to retrieve a lexical unit, and not the successful retrieval of a specific lexical unit, that causes semantic cost in picture naming. This cost can be explained by a mechanism of weakening the semantic-to-lexical mappings of semantic coordinate words. The findings are also discussed in the context of retrieval-induced forgetting effects in memory recall research.
获取语义信息会对相似信息的后续恢复尝试产生负面影响。例如，在图片命名任务中，命名一个物体所需的时间取决于已经命名的同一类别中的物品总数；命名延迟与之前命名的所有语义相关单词的总数成正比增加。这种现象被称为累积语义成本（或干扰）。两个针对儿童（4-11 岁，229 名参与者）的图片命名实验调查了成功命名之前的类别内项目是否是累积语义成本出现的必要条件。我们预计，与年龄较大的儿童相比，年幼的儿童会有更高的无反应率，这反映了年幼的儿童尚未巩固许多词汇代表的事实。我们的结果证实了这一预测。至关重要的是，我们还观察到，累积语义成本与成功检索先前类别内的词汇项目无关。此外，对于先前类别内的项目引起无反应的图片试验与那些先前类别内的项目引起正确命名事件的图片试验具有相同的成本。我们的发现表明，导致图片命名中语义成本的是检索词汇单元的尝试，而不是特定词汇单元的成功检索。这种成本可以通过一种削弱语义坐标词的语义到词汇映射的机制来解释。研究结果还在记忆召回研究中的检索诱导遗忘效应的背景下进行了讨论。
