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.
Highlights
In daily life, following massed overt repetition of a character, we usually have a peculiar sense of uncertainty of the meaning or a peculiar sense of unfamiliarity with the orthographic composition of the character (Kuhl and Anderson, 2011; Cheng and Lin, 2013)
The most striking finding of our work is that the lexical satiation effect does exist under the present experimental conditions, and it changes across the course of time due to the competing process between satiation effect and practice effect
This tug-of-war like competition shows up in the results: (1) The practice effect won the competition in the first set reflected in the decreased response time across trial positions
Summary
In daily life, following massed overt repetition of a character, we usually have a peculiar sense of uncertainty of the meaning or a peculiar sense of unfamiliarity with the orthographic composition of the character (Kuhl and Anderson, 2011; Cheng and Lin, 2013). ROUSE theory proposed that the source confusion can be reduced by discounting the information from previous characters (Huber et al, 2002) This discounting mechanism of information produces a deficit in processing repetitions (Tian and Huber, 2010), meaning that the satiation effect occurs
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