dc.description.abstract | Semantic transparency is an important property of compound word. By definition, the meaning of transparent words can be inferred by their constituents; in contrast, the meaning of opaque words cannot be derived from their constituents. The experiments of this thesis aimed to examine whether and how the mirror effect, which has been reported in previous recognition memory studies that manipulated the frequency and neighborhood size of the materials, would be induced by the semantic transparency of Chinese two-character words.
In Experiments One and Two, participants engaged in a study-test recognition memory test, where the semantic transparency was manipuoated as a with-subejcts and a between-subjects factor, respectively. The Remember/Know procedure was employed in both experiments to examine the contributions of recollection and familiarity to the memory perforamcnes for these two types of words. A reliable mirror effect was observed in both experiments. In comparison to transparent words, opaque words elicited a higher hit rate and a lower false alarm rate, In addition, the higher hit rate for opaque words mainly comes from a larger proportion of Remember response, while the higher false alarm rate for transparent words mainly comes from a larger prorion of Know response., These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that the different processing of Transparent and Opaque words will lead to mirror effect. The findings are also consistent with the dual-process account for the mirror effect.
In Experiment Three, subjects engaged in the same procedure as Experiment 1, except that the Remember/Know procedure was not employed. Instead, the ERPs were recorded at test, aiming to examine the electrophysiological correlates of the mirror effect einduced by semantic transparency. The behavioral data gave rise to a mirror effect. In the ERP data, the left parietal old/new effect, thought to reflect recollection-based recognition, was larger for opaque words than for transparent words. The data therefore was consistent with Experiment 1 in showing that opaque words elicited more recollective experience than transparent onew. However, the mid frontal old/new effect, thought to reflect familiarity, was however equivalent for both types of words. In addition, it was found that the difference between the parietal effect for these two types of words mainly comes from the waves asoociated with correct rejections. These results suggested that participants might have adopted different criteria while making memory judgments to these types of words.
In Experiment Four, a procedure that incorporated Remember/Know response and cofident judgment was employed. Subjects made five response categories, i.e., Rememebr, Sure Old, Not-Sure Old, Not-Sure New, Sure New, to transparent and opaque words. It was found that opaque words received more Remember Hits than transparent words, as in Experiments One and Two. However, for correct rejections to these two types of words, there was a higher proportion of confident rejection (Sure New) for transparent words than for opaque ones. This finding therefore support that the ERP findings in Experiment Three might have come from different criteria aopted by subjects for these two types of words. To examine this possibility, ERPs were recorded in Experiment 5 while subjects made confidence old/new judgments to transparent and opaque words. The ERP analysis only included the response categories of confident hits and confident correct rejections. The left parietal old/new effect was still larger for opaque words than transparent words, suggesting that this pattern of results was not due to the different cirteirial for these two types of words. Neverhteless, the mid frontal effect was found to be larger for opaque words than for transparent words. In addition, the difference in mid frontal effect mainly comes from correct rejections.
Across the five experiments, opaque words gave rise to better memory performance and more recollection than transparent words. A plausible interpretation for these results is offered in the thesis as follows. The better memory performance for opaque words may result from the distincivess associated with opaque words during the time of encoding. On the other hand, the transparent words might have elicited a more flent processing than opaque words, such that the resulting familiarity led to the higher false alarm rate for trasnpsrent words than for opaque words.
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