Contribution of Word Meaning and Components of Familiarity to Lexical Decision: A Study With Pseudowords Constructed From Words With Known or Unknown Meaning
On a sélectionné des mots français appartenant à 3 catégories: mots connus des participants et de signification connue d'eux (KM-W), mots connus mais de signification inconnue (UM-W), mots complètement inconnus (U-W). Bien que les mots KM et UM fussent de fréquences linguistique et subjective équivalentes, des jugements de familiarité montrèrent que les premiers étaient plus familiers. Cela suggère qu'il existe deux composants principaux de la familiarité des mots: avec leur forme et avec leur signification. On a construit à partir de là des pseudo-mots KM-Pwords, UM-Pwords et U-Pwords. Des jugements de familiarité montrèrent à nouveau que les KM-Pwords étaient plus familiers que les UM-Pwords. Ces pseudo-mots furent utilisés dans une tâche de décision lexicale en opposition à des mots usuels. Les temps de décision Non furent plus longs pour les KM-Pwords que pour les UM-Pwords. Cela corrobore l'hypothèse de deux composants de la familiarité des mots: ce fait devrait être pris en considération dans toute étude utilisant la décision lexicale.45 French words were selected: 15 of them were known by the participants who were also aware of their meaning (KM-W), 15 were known although their meaning was unknown (UM-W), and 15 were unknown (U-W). Although linguistic and experiential frequencies were equivalent for the KM and UM words, familiarity ratings indicated that the former were more familiar. This suggests that usual word familiarity involves two components: familiarity with the word form, and familiarity with the meaning. Pseudowords were constructed from the original words: the familiarity ratings also indicated that KM-Pwords were more familiar than UM-Pwords. These pseudowords were used in a lexical decision task which also made use of normal words. No responses were longer for KM-Pwords than UM-Pwords. This finding supports the assumption that two components are involved in the familiarity of normal words and that this fact should be taken into consideration in any experiment involving lexical decision
