短时和长时记忆中的句式效应

THE EFFECT OF SENTENCE-TYPE IN IMMEDIATE AND LONG-TERM MEM0RY

本研究的目的在于探讨短时记忆(STM)和长时记忆(LTM)中是否存在句式效应。实验选用汉语中的三类句式:陈述句、被动句和疑问句。每个句子由七个字组成。两个实验采用STM作业,一个实验采用LTM作业。STM实验表明,三类句式在STM中不仅都能得到贮存和输出,而且它们具有大致相等的短时获得量,并在有限的STM容量里占有大致相等的空间。由此可见,对句子的短时贮存加工很少受甚至几乎不受句子结构型式的影响,即STM中没有显示明显的句式效应。但在LTM中,句式效应有较明显的表现。因为不同句式在长时保持量和遗忘速度上,存在着较大的差异。具体表现为陈述句比被动句和疑问句更占优势。此外,在LTM中发生的句法错误上,表现了核心句(即陈述句或主动句)替代非核心句(即疑问句和被动句)的强烈倾向。本研究提出逆转换或还原假说,用以解释与说明陈述句在LTM中的优势。

The present research is to explore whether there is sentence-type ef-fect in immediate and long-term memory. Three types of sentences werechosen: declarative, interogative and passive, each sentence consisted ofseven Chinese characters. Three experiments were conducted: two on STMtasks. One on LTM tasks. The STM experiments showed that the threesentence-types were stored and retrieved in STM, they possess approxi-mately equal amounts of short-term acquisition and occupied approxima-tely equal space within STM capacity. It can be seen that informationof short-term storage is not affected by sentence-type. However, differ-ent sentence-types have quite different effect in the amount of long-termretention and forgetting rate. The declarative sentences were betterstored in LTM than passive and interrogative sentences. Besides, therewas a strong tendency of replacing non-kernel (intrrogative and passive)sentences by kernel (declarative or active) sentences in LTM. These res-ults showed that once sentence information is transfered into LTM, thesentence-type information seems to be lost, the encoded and retentedinformation is the meanings of sentences. Proposition is the unit of the mean-ing. The propositions take tendentiously the simplest and clearest form,that is, declarative or active sentence-types. A counter-transformation orreduction hypothesis is proposed to explain the advantage of declarative(or active) sentence.