Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
Cognition. 2025 Jan;254:105960. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2024.105960. Epub 2024 Sep 17.
Reading research has long been concerned with the question of whether the reading brain accesses lexical representations via absolute or relative letter position information. In recent years, important results have been obtained with the flanker lexical decision task. Studies have shown faster decisions about target words (e.g., 'rock') when flanked by related letters ('ro rock ck') than unrelated letters ('st rock ep')-and crucially, equal facilitation upon switching flanker positions ('ck rock ro'), pointing to relative rather than absolute letter position coding. Yet, a later study employing longer targets and flankers yielded detrimental effects of switching flanker positions. In order to get a better grasp on the equivocal evidence thus far, here we carried out an extensive test of flanker relatedness and position effects, using various target and flanker lengths, all within a single experiment. We observed a clear reduction of flanker relatedness effects upon switching flanker positions, and this held true across target and flanker lengths. The present results unambiguously suggest that lexical access is driven by absolute letter position information, and furthermore, are accurately predicted by the recent PONG model (Snell, 2024b).
阅读研究一直关注这样一个问题，即阅读大脑是否通过绝对或相对的字母位置信息来获取词汇表征。近年来，侧翼词汇判断任务取得了重要成果。研究表明，当目标词（如“rock”）两侧是相关字母（如“ro rock ck”）时，决策速度会更快，而不是不相关字母（如“st rock ep”）- 关键的是，当切换侧翼位置时，也会出现同等的促进作用（“ck rock ro”），这指向相对而不是绝对的字母位置编码。然而，后来的一项研究采用了更长的目标词和侧翼词，结果却显示出了切换侧翼位置的不利影响。为了更好地理解迄今为止存在的模棱两可的证据，我们在这里进行了广泛的侧翼相关性和位置效应测试，使用了各种不同的目标词和侧翼词长度，所有这些都在一个单一的实验中进行。我们观察到，当切换侧翼位置时，侧翼相关性效应明显降低，而且这种情况在目标词和侧翼词长度上都成立。本研究结果明确表明，词汇通达是由绝对的字母位置信息驱动的，而且最近的 PONG 模型（Snell，2024b）准确地预测了这一结果。
