Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Department of Experimental and Applied Psychology, the Netherlands.
Cognition. 2024 Jan;242:105664. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2023.105664. Epub 2023 Nov 8.
To what extent do readers process multiple words in parallel? Although it is now commonly accepted that letters are processed across multiple words simultaneously, higher-order (lexical, semantic, syntactic) parallel processing remains contentious. Recent use of the flanker paradigm has revealed that the syntactic recognition of foveal target words is influenced by the syntactic congruency of parafoveal flanking words even when target and flankers are shown for only 170 ms. It has been argued, however, that such settings may allow processing of multiple words even if this were to happen on a serial one-by-one basis. To circumvent this possibility, here I have tested participants in a syntactic categorization task whereby targets and flankers were shown for only 50 ms and replaced by post-masks. Significant effects of target-flanker congruency were observed in both response times and accuracy, indicating that readers extracted syntactic information from multiple words within the very brief presentation time. The present results strongly suggest that the brain extracts higher-order linguistic information from multiple words in parallel.
读者在多大程度上能并行处理多个单词？虽然现在人们普遍认为字母是跨多个单词同时处理的，但高阶（词汇、语义、句法）并行处理仍然存在争议。最近使用侧抑制范式发现，即使目标和侧翼只显示 170 毫秒，中央凹目标词的句法识别也会受到旁侧侧翼词的句法一致性的影响。然而，有人认为，即使这种处理是按顺序逐个进行的，这种设置也可能允许处理多个单词。为了避免这种可能性，我在一个句法分类任务中测试了参与者，在这个任务中，目标和侧翼只显示 50 毫秒，然后被后掩蔽取代。在反应时间和准确性上都观察到了目标-侧翼一致性的显著影响，这表明读者在非常短暂的呈现时间内从多个单词中提取了句法信息。这些结果强烈表明，大脑能并行地从多个单词中提取高阶语言信息。
