Jia Xiaofei, Zhou Changle, Wang Tao
Department of Psychology, Qufu Normal University, Qufu 273165, China.
Department of Cognitive Science, Xiamen University, Xiamen 361005, China.
Brain Sci. 2023 Jul 6;13(7):1033. doi: 10.3390/brainsci13071033.
Compound words in psycholinguistics pose a significant challenge for researchers as their meaning involves more than the sum of their parts. The role of semantic relations in this process is crucial, and studies have reported a phenomenon known as relation priming. It suggests that previously encountered relations enhance the processing of subsequent words with the same relation. Notably, this priming effect is limited to cases where there is morpheme repetition between the priming and target words. In the present study, 33 samples from the target group were selected, and the within-subject design of 3 morphemes (modifier-shared, head-shared, non-repeated) × 2 relations (relation-same, relation-different) was adopted to explore whether the relation priming effect would occur without morpheme repetition and its time course. Significant relation priming effects were found in both behavioral and electrophysiological experimental results. These findings indicating relation priming can occur independently of morpheme repetition, and it has been activated at a very early stage (about 200 ms). As the word processing progresses, this activation gradually strengthens, indicating that the relation role is slowly increasing in the process of compound word recognition. It may first be used as context information to help determine the constituent morphemes' meaning. After the meaning access of the constituent morphemes, they begin to play a role in the semantic composition process. This study uses electrophysiological technology to precisely describe the representation of relation and its time course for the first time, which gives us a deeper understanding of the relation priming process, and at the same time, sheds light on the meaning construction process of compounds.
心理语言学中的复合词对研究人员来说是一个重大挑战，因为它们的意义不仅仅是其组成部分的总和。语义关系在这个过程中的作用至关重要，并且研究报告了一种被称为关系启动的现象。这表明先前遇到的关系会增强对后续具有相同关系的单词的处理。值得注意的是，这种启动效应仅限于启动词和目标词之间存在词素重复的情况。在本研究中，从目标组中选取了33个样本，并采用3个词素（修饰语共享、词头共享、非重复）×2种关系（关系相同、关系不同）的被试内设计，以探究在没有词素重复的情况下关系启动效应是否会发生及其时间进程。在行为学和电生理学实验结果中均发现了显著的关系启动效应。这些发现表明关系启动可以独立于词素重复而发生，并且它在非常早期阶段（约200毫秒）就已被激活。随着单词处理的进行，这种激活逐渐增强，表明关系作用在复合词识别过程中逐渐增加。它可能首先作为上下文信息来帮助确定组成词素的意义。在组成词素的意义被获取之后，它们开始在语义组合过程中发挥作用。本研究首次使用电生理技术精确描述了关系的表征及其时间进程，这使我们对关系启动过程有了更深入的理解，同时也为复合词的意义构建过程提供了线索。
