Funnell E
Department of Psychology, Royal Holloway University of London, Egham, Surrey, UK.
Memory. 1995 Sep-Dec;3(3-4):497-518. doi: 10.1080/09658219508253162.
This paper reports a study of the breakdown of semantic memory in the case of a subject with semantic dementia. The first experiment shows that the subject failed to comprehend words of low familiarity and word frequency, even though the spoken word forms were recognised as familiar. Experiments 2 and 3 showed (a) that the recall of word meanings in definition tasks did not vary with the generality of the word meaning (e.g. category, basic level, or subordinate property) but varied instead with the concept familiarity and frequency of the name; (b) that the ability to verify properties of basic-level objects was not affected by the ability to comprehend the property name, but depended instead on the degree of knowledge demonstrated for the object name in definition tasks; (c) that properties were frequently verified correctly when the object had been defined only to the superordinate level. It is argued that the results do not support the widely held view that, in general, specific information is lost first when semantic memory breaks down. The selective failure to recall specific information for some word meanings is discussed with reference to two theoretical accounts.
本文报告了一项针对患有语义性痴呆症患者语义记忆衰退情况的研究。第一个实验表明，尽管能够识别出熟悉的口语单词形式，但该患者却无法理解低熟悉度和低词频的单词。实验2和实验3表明：（a）在定义任务中，单词意义的回忆并不随单词意义的一般性（如类别、基本层次或从属属性）而变化，而是随概念熟悉度和名称词频而变化；（b）验证基本层次物体属性的能力不受理解属性名称能力的影响，而是取决于在定义任务中对物体名称所展示的知识程度；（c）当物体仅被定义到上位层次时，属性经常能被正确验证。有人认为，这些结果并不支持普遍持有的观点，即一般来说，当语义记忆衰退时，特定信息首先丧失。本文参照两种理论解释讨论了对某些单词意义选择性地无法回忆特定信息的情况。
