Ziegler J C, Perry C
School of Behavioural Sciences, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia.
Cognition. 1998 Aug;68(2):B53-62. doi: 10.1016/s0010-0277(98)00047-x.
In the area of visual word recognition, there is considerable disagreement as to whether neighborhood effects for words in the lexical decision task are facilitatory or inhibitory: While they seem to be mostly facilitatory in English, they tend to be absent or inhibitory in French or Spanish. The present study investigated the possibility that the facilitatory neighborhood effect obtained in English is due to the fact that most neighbors in English are body neighbors (i.e. they share the same orthographic rime). Our results showed that when words were matched for orthographic neighborhood (N), the effects of body neighbors (BN) were facilitatory (i.e. shorter reaction times for words with many body neighbors than for words with few body neighbors). In contrast, when words are matched for BN, the effects of N are unreliable with a tendency towards inhibition. In conclusion, it appears that research conducted in English has always found neighborhood effects to be facilitatory because of the dominant role of body neighbors in English. In contrast, neighborhood effects in French and Spanish may have been more ambiguous because these languages either do not confound N and BN, or they do not require a greater sensitivity to the body/rime unit.
在视觉单词识别领域，对于词汇判断任务中单词的邻域效应是促进性的还是抑制性的，存在相当大的分歧：虽然在英语中它们似乎大多是促进性的，但在法语或西班牙语中往往不存在或具有抑制性。本研究调查了英语中获得的促进性邻域效应可能是由于英语中的大多数邻词是词体邻词（即它们共享相同的正字法韵部）这一事实。我们的结果表明，当单词在正字法邻域（N）方面进行匹配时，词体邻词（BN）的效应是促进性的（即与词体邻词少的单词相比，词体邻词多的单词反应时间更短）。相反，当单词在BN方面进行匹配时，N的效应不可靠且有抑制趋势。总之，似乎在英语中进行的研究总是发现邻域效应是促进性的，因为词体邻词在英语中占主导地位。相比之下，法语和西班牙语中的邻域效应可能更不明确，因为这些语言要么不会混淆N和BN，要么对词体/韵部单元的敏感度要求不高。
