Department of Experimental Psychology, Ghent University, Belgium.
Laboratoire de Psychologie Cognitive, CNRS & Aix-Marseille University, France; Institute for Language, Communication and the Brain, Aix-Marseille University, France.
Cognition. 2022 Jan;218:104945. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2021.104945. Epub 2021 Oct 29.
Can the presence of unrelated flanker words change the way that lexical decisions are made to target words in the flankers task? Here we examined the impact of flanker presence on the effects of word concreteness. Target words had high or low concreteness ratings (e.g., fork, free) and were either presented in isolation or flanked to the left and right by an unrelated word (e.g., cold free cold) that was irrelevant for the task. Results revealed that the facilitatory effect of concreteness (faster responses to concrete words compared with abstract words) was significantly greater in the presence of flankers. A control experiment revealed the same pattern with pseudoword and nonword flankers. We conclude that the mere presence of flanking letter strings causes a greater depth of processing of target words. We further speculate that this might arise by flankers inducing a more "sentence-like" context by the presence of multiple, spatially distinct letter strings, that prohibits the use of more superficial decision processes and can be used to make lexical decisions to isolated words.
无关的侧显词是否会改变词汇决策任务中对侧显词的目标词的决策方式？在这里，我们研究了侧显词的存在对词具体性的影响。目标词具有高或低的具体性评分（例如，叉，自由），并且要么单独呈现，要么在左侧和右侧被无关的词（例如，冷自由冷）侧显，这些词与任务无关。结果表明，在存在侧显词的情况下，具体性的促进作用（与抽象词相比，对具体词的反应更快）要大得多。一个控制实验显示了用伪词和非词侧显词也存在相同的模式。我们得出的结论是，仅仅侧显字母串的存在就会导致目标词的处理深度增加。我们进一步推测，这可能是由于侧显词通过存在多个空间上不同的字母串来诱导出更“类似句子”的上下文，从而禁止使用更肤浅的决策过程，并可用于对孤立词进行词汇决策。
