关键词: 语义饱和, 词汇加工, 中文词汇, 文本阅读, 启动

Abstract: Many of us may have a noticeable experience that when we continuously looking at a character or a word, it will then become strange and weird. This phenomenon was first investigated century ago at 1970, and it was defined as verbal satiation back then. During the researches of such phenomenon, many researchers have reported that prolonged viewing (e.g. 1 minute) or massive repetition (e.g. 30 times) of an English words, result in a lapse or a loss of the meaning of the word. Jakobovits (1960) had first identified this subjective experience as semantic satiation, emphasized that the locus of satiation is to be semantic. Followed researches conducted in English language proved with many paradigms that semantic satiation was commonly occurred, which means with the continual observation to the target word, its meaning will gradually fade away. The same phenomenon was also proved to be existed within Chinese and Japanese characters. However, researchers claimed that the satiation in Chinese characters has nothing to do with semantic but merely an effect of the structure, therefore should be named as “orthographic semantic”. Different ideas among researchers have evoked questions on this issue, whether there is an essential difference between different languages on verbal satiation or it’s just a matter of detection? The representation and the mechanism of verbal satiation are required to be further discussed. This research used speed category matching paradigm to investigate the satiation in Chinese words, as we all know Chinese is a typical ideographic language when English is a phonetic language, so the satiation in this two language may have raised some difference. Four experiments are included in the research. In exp1, test whether the category matching paradigmcan detect satiation with the priming of Chinese words. In exp 2, use lexical repetition to test if the satiation was occurred in the process of lexical representation. In exp3, use meaning repetition to test if the satiation was occurred in the process of semantic representation. In exp4, use ideographic Chinese words to see how it influences satiation. All experiments used 2(repetition status)*2(matching status) within-subject design. All subjects were Chinese college students. In the data analysis, in order to successfully detect repetition factor, the trial position in each block will be regard as a new study factor. The study results showed that in exp1, the reaction time was prolonged due to the repetition, which indicates the occurrence of satiation. However, exp2 and exp3 suggest that lexical repetition and semantic repetition alone cannot trigger satiation. In exp4, use the ideographic words as materialonce again triggered satiation in the processof semantic repetition. The results of these four experiments indicate that there is semantic satiation in Chinese words, which showed no essential difference between English and Chinese. However, since the form of Chinese words includes abundant semantic information, the satiation can be in either occurred in the associative level or purely in semantic level.

Key words: semantic satiation, word representation, Chinese words, text-reading, priming