No abstract

High repetitions of a character induce a feeling of uncertainty of the character. This phenomenon is named as Verbal Satiation. However, the locus and nature of the verbal satiation remain controversial. To investigate whether verbal satiation occurs at the lexical representational locus, we used rarely used Chinese characters as stimuli to exclude confounding factor of meaning access. Participants were asked to judge whether or not a single Chinese character such as “” is a composition of a rarely used Chinese character such as “.” The experiment consists of 4 sets with 11 blocks in each set. Every 20 trials consist of a block, and the same rarely used characters were repeated in half of these trials. To observe the satiation effect that is offset by practice effect with more statistical power, we did ANOVA analysis for each set. The statistical results revealed that subjects responded differently at different time periods. In the first set, participants responded faster in later trials; After that, reversely, participants responded slower in later trials; Then they responded slower for the repeated characters in middle trials; Finally, participants responded slower for the repeated characters without regard to the trial position. These results show a competition process between satiation effect and practice effect and reveal that the verbal satiation can occur at a lexical representational locus.

There are two contending models regarding the processing of negation: the fusion model and the schema-plus-tag model. Most previous studies have centered on negation in languages such as English and Mandarin, where negators are positioned before predicates. Mongolian, quite uniquely, is a language whose negators are post-verbal, making them natural replicas of the schema-plus-tag model. The present study aims to investigate the representation process of Mongolian contradictory negative sentences to shed light on the debate between the models, meanwhile verifying the post-verbal effect of negators. A series of experiments using the sentence–picture verification paradigm supports the fusion model: (i) Mongolian contradictory negative sentences were processed by representing the actual conditions rather than the negated state of affairs at 250 ISI (interstimulus interval of 250 ms), and (ii) despite the fact that a post-verbal effect of negators was measured at 250 ISI when Mongolian and Mandarin negative sentences were compared, Mongolian–Mandarin bilinguals adopted the same representational strategy for contradictory negation in both languages.