Deacon D, Hewitt S, Tamney T
Department of Psychology, City College of the City University of New York, 138th Street at Convent Avenue, New York, NY 10031, USA.
Brain Res Cogn Brain Res. 1998 Jan;6(3):219-25. doi: 10.1016/s0926-6410(97)00019-0.
Interposing an unrelated word between related primes and targets often disrupts priming. This finding has been used to support the view that semantic information is represented in a distributed fashion, rather than locally. In some studies where unrelated items intervened between the prime and target, however, significant priming was nevertheless obtained. The discrepant results of these studies has been attributed to differences in speed-accuracy tradeoff, post-lexical checking, conscious rehearsal of the prime and differences in the depth to which the prime and target were processed. The present study was designed in such a way as to minimize variability associated with post-lexical influences. The N400 component of the human event-related potential was used as a physiological index of the extent to which priming occurred with and without the interposition of an unrelated item. Priming effects on both the amplitude and latency of the N400 were rendered non-significant by the presence of an intervening unrelated word. The results are interpreted as tentative evidence that semantic representations are distributed.
在相关的启动词和目标词之间插入一个不相关的词通常会干扰启动效应。这一发现被用来支持语义信息是以分布式方式而非局部方式表征的观点。然而，在一些研究中，尽管在启动词和目标词之间插入了不相关的项目，但仍获得了显著的启动效应。这些研究结果的差异归因于速度-准确性权衡、词汇后检查、启动词的有意识复述以及启动词和目标词的加工深度差异。本研究的设计旨在尽量减少与词汇后影响相关的变异性。人类事件相关电位的N400成分被用作有无不相关项目插入时启动效应发生程度的生理指标。一个插入的不相关词使启动效应在N400的振幅和潜伏期上都不显著。这些结果被解释为语义表征是分布式的初步证据。
