Corps Ruth E, Meyer Antje S
Psychology of Language Department, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, The Netherlands.
Psychology of Language Department, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, The Netherlands; Donders Centre of Cognition and Cognitive Neuroscience, Radboud University, The Netherlands.
Acta Psychol (Amst). 2023 Nov;241:104073. doi: 10.1016/j.actpsy.2023.104073. Epub 2023 Nov 8.
Word frequency plays a key role in theories of lexical access, which assume that the word frequency effect (WFE, faster access to high-frequency than low-frequency words) occurs as a result of differences in the representation and processing of the words. In a seminal paper, Jescheniak and Levelt (1994) proposed that the WFE arises during the retrieval of word forms, rather than the retrieval of their syntactic representations (their lemmas) or articulatory commands. An important part of Jescheniak and Levelt's argument was that they found a stable WFE in a picture naming task, which requires complete lexical access, but not in a gender decision task, which only requires access to the words' lemmas and not their word forms. We report two attempts to replicate this pattern, one with new materials, and one with Jescheniak and Levelt's orginal pictures. In both studies we found a strong WFE when the pictures were shown for the first time, but much weaker effects on their second and third presentation. Importantly these patterns were seen in both the picture naming and the gender decision tasks, suggesting that either word frequency does not exclusively affect word form retrieval, or that the gender decision task does not exclusively tap lemma access.
词频在词汇通达理论中起着关键作用，这些理论认为词频效应（WFE，高频词比低频词的通达速度更快）是由于单词在表征和加工方面的差异而产生的。在一篇具有开创性的论文中，耶施尼亚克和莱尔特（1994）提出词频效应出现在词形检索过程中，而非其句法表征（词元）或发音指令的检索过程中。耶施尼亚克和莱尔特观点的一个重要部分是，他们在图片命名任务（该任务需要完整的词汇通达）中发现了稳定的词频效应，但在性别判断任务中却没有发现，后者只需要通达单词的词元而不需要其词形。我们报告了两次复制这种模式的尝试，一次使用新材料，另一次使用耶施尼亚克和莱尔特原来的图片。在两项研究中，我们都发现当图片首次呈现时存在很强的词频效应，但在第二次和第三次呈现时效应要弱得多。重要的是，在图片命名任务和性别判断任务中都出现了这些模式，这表明要么词频并非仅影响词形检索，要么性别判断任务并非仅涉及词元通达。
