语义饱和现象及其认知机制

Semantic Satiation and Its Cognitive Mechanism

大部分人有过长时间注视一个字之后突然不认识这个字,或多次重复背诵一个词语后会发现这个词变得"陌生"的经历。早期的心理学家发现在字词持续注意过程中语义会丢失,他们将这种现象命名为语义饱和。经过100多年的研究,众多心理学家发展了多种语义评价的方法来测量语义饱和,并发现语义饱和可能发生在知觉表征、语义加工或者词语表征与语义的联结阶段。类似的现象在中文等语标文字加工中表现出一种特有的字形饱和。近年来,新的认知心理学实验范式和神经科学技术的发展将有可能使得语义饱和研究取得重要的突破。

When we look at a word or a character for a relative long period, or read a word repeatedly, we will have a special experience that the meaning of word is lost or the word seems strange. About 100 years ago, psychologists noticed this phenomenon, and named it as semantic satiation. Since then, a variety of methods has been developed to measure or evaluate the semantic satiation. However, these different methods failed to converge on a coherence conclusion what the semantic satiation is. At the same time, researchers proposed three possible accounts that the semantic satiation may occur in the stages of the perceptual representation, semantic processing, or the association between the lexical item and meaning. Each of accounts was supported by some studies. Additionally, this review also introduced a similar phenomenon named orthographic satiation occurring in ideograph like Chinese characters. In recent years, the development of experimental paradigms of cognitive psychology and neuroscience technology make it possible to make a progress on semantic satiation study, and reveal its neural mechanism.