Vandendaele Aaron, Grainger Jonathan
Department of Experimental Psychology, Ghent University, Belgium.
Department of Linguistics and Literary Studies, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium.
Q J Exp Psychol (Hove). 2025 Jun 4:17470218251350584. doi: 10.1177/17470218251350584.
We report the results of two experiments that used the Rapid Parallel Visual Presentation (RPVP) procedure to evaluate the contributions of syntactic and semantic information when identifying words within a sentence context. Participants were presented with five-word sequences that could either be grammatically correct (e.g., ) or an ungrammatical re-ordering of the same words (e.g., ). Word sequences were displayed for 200 ms, after which participants were asked to classify a word at a post-cued location - either Position 2, 3, or 4, in the 5-word sequence. In Experiment 1, the classification was based on a syntactic category (is this word a noun or an adjective?). In Experiment 2, the classification was based on retrieval of the object associated with the word (is the object referred to by this word bigger or smaller than 1 m?). Analyses tested for effects of grammaticality on word classification accuracy (i.e., a sentence superiority effect - SSE) per target word position in both experiments. For syntactic classifications (Experiment 1), the SSE was significant at all positions. On the other hand, for semantic classifications, the SSE was only significant at Position 4. We conclude that in the RPVP paradigm readers use both syntactic and semantic information to rapidly build a primitive sentence structure, but with semantic constraints having a later influence. This structure then helps them to associate more detailed syntactic and semantic information to word identities at specific locations within the sentence.
我们报告了两项实验的结果，这两项实验使用快速并行视觉呈现（RPVP）程序来评估在句子语境中识别单词时句法和语义信息的作用。向参与者呈现由五个单词组成的序列，这些序列要么语法正确（例如， ），要么是相同单词的语法错误重新排序（例如， ）。单词序列显示200毫秒，之后要求参与者对五词序列中提示位置（即位置2、3或4）的单词进行分类。在实验1中，分类基于句法类别（这个单词是名词还是形容词？）。在实验2中，分类基于与该单词相关联的对象的检索（这个单词所指的对象比1米大还是小？）。两项实验均分析了语法性对每个目标单词位置的单词分类准确性的影响（即句子优势效应——SSE）。对于句法分类（实验1），SSE在所有位置均显著。另一方面，对于语义分类，SSE仅在位置4显著。我们得出结论，在RPVP范式中，读者使用句法和语义信息来快速构建一个基本的句子结构，但语义约束的影响较晚出现。然后，这种结构帮助他们将更详细的句法和语义信息与句子中特定位置的单词身份相关联。
