Department of Psychology, Mississippi State University, 215 Magruder Hall, Mississippi State, MS, USA.
Psychon Bull Rev. 2024 Oct;31(5):2102-2117. doi: 10.3758/s13423-024-02463-x. Epub 2024 Feb 15.
It is well known that contextual predictability facilitates word identification, but it is less clear whether the uncertainty associated with the current context (i.e., its lexical entropy) influences sentence processing. On the one hand, high entropy contexts may lead to interference due to greater number of lexical competitors. On the other hand, predicting multiple lexical competitors may facilitate processing through the preactivation of shared semantic features. In this study, we examined whether entropy measured at the trial level (i.e., for each participant, for each item) corresponds to facilitatory or inhibitory effects. Trial-level entropy captures each individual's knowledge about specific contexts and is therefore a more valid and sensitive measure of entropy (relative to the commonly employed item-level entropy). Participants (N = 112) completed two experimental sessions (with counterbalanced orders) that were separated by a 3- to 14-day interval. In one session, they produced up to 10 completions for sentence fragments (N = 647). In another session, they read the same sentences including a target word (whose entropy value was calculated based on the produced completions) while reading times were measured. We observed a facilitatory (not inhibitory) effect of trial-level entropy on lexical processing over and above item-level measures of lexical predictability (including cloze probability, surprisal, and semantic constraint). Extra analyses revealed that greater semantic overlap between the target and the produced responses facilitated target processing. Thus, the results lend support to theories of lexical prediction maintaining that prediction involves broad activation of semantic features rather than activation of full lexical forms.
众所周知,语境的可预测性有助于单词识别,但目前尚不清楚当前语境(即词汇熵)的不确定性是否会影响句子处理。一方面,高熵语境可能会因更多的词汇竞争者而导致干扰。另一方面,预测多个词汇竞争者可能会通过共享语义特征的预激活来促进处理。在这项研究中,我们检查了在试验水平(即对于每个参与者,每个项目)测量的熵是否对应于促进或抑制效应。试验水平的熵捕获了每个个体对特定语境的知识,因此是一种更有效和敏感的熵测量方法(相对于常用的项目水平熵)。参与者(N=112)完成了两个实验会议(平衡顺序),间隔 3 到 14 天。在一个会议中,他们为句子片段生成了多达 10 个完成(N=647)。在另一个会议中,他们阅读了相同的句子,包括一个目标词(其熵值是根据生成的完成计算的),同时测量阅读时间。我们观察到试验水平熵对词汇处理有促进作用(而不是抑制作用),超过了词汇可预测性的项目水平测量(包括完形概率、惊讶度和语义约束)。额外的分析表明,目标和生成的反应之间更大的语义重叠促进了目标处理。因此,结果支持了词汇预测的理论,即预测涉及广泛的语义特征激活,而不是全词汇形式的激活。