Czypionka Anna, Kharaman Mariya, Eulitz Carsten
Department of Linguistics, University of Konstanz, Konstanz, Germany.
Front Psychol. 2023 Aug 17;14:1173352. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1173352. eCollection 2023.
Animacy is an intrinsic semantic property of words referring to living things. A long line of evidence shows that words with animate referents require lower processing costs during word recognition than words with inanimate referents, leading among others to a decreased N400 amplitude in reaction to animate relative to inanimate objects. In the current study, we use this animacy effect to provide evidence for access to the semantic properties of constituents in German noun-noun compounds. While morphological decomposition of noun-noun compounds is well-researched and illustrated by the robust influence of lexical constituent properties like constituent length and frequency, findings for semantic decomposition are less clear in the current literature. By manipulating the animacy of compound modifiers and heads, we are able to manipulate the relative ease of lexical access strictly due to intrinsic semantic properties of the constituents. Our results show additive effects of constituent animacy, with a higher number of animate constituents leading to gradually attenuated N400 amplitudes. We discuss the implications of our findings for current models of complex word recognition, as well as stimulus construction practices in psycho-and neurolinguistic research.
有生命性是指称生物的词汇的一种内在语义属性。大量证据表明，具有有生命指称对象的词汇在单词识别过程中比具有无生命指称对象的词汇需要更低的加工成本，这尤其导致相对于无生命物体，对有生命物体做出反应时N400波幅减小。在当前的研究中，我们利用这种有生命性效应来为获取德语名词-名词复合词中成分的语义属性提供证据。虽然名词-名词复合词的形态分解已得到充分研究，并且词汇成分属性（如成分长度和频率）的强大影响也对此进行了说明，但目前文献中关于语义分解的研究结果尚不明确。通过操纵复合修饰语和中心词的有生命性，我们能够严格基于成分的内在语义属性来操纵词汇通达的相对难易程度。我们的结果显示了成分有生命性的累加效应，有生命成分数量越多，N400波幅逐渐减小。我们讨论了我们的研究结果对当前复杂单词识别模型的意义，以及心理语言学和神经语言学研究中的刺激构建实践。
