The study investigated the effect of unintentional learning of semantically unrelated word pairs on event-related brain potentials. Two experiments were conducted, in whose acquisition phase participants listened to five pairs of semantically unrelated words, each pair being repeated twenty times. In the test phase of Experiment 1, these “old” pairs were presented mixed with “new” pairs containing other words. In the test phase of Experiment 2, a third condition was added in which the first word in a pair was one of the words presented during acquisition but the second word was new. In both experiments, the second word in new word pairs elicited an N400 and a late (550–1000 ms) frontal positivity. The amplitude of the N400 to new second words in Experiment 2 was significantly larger when the first word in the pair was an old (previously learnt) word, as compared with the condition in which both first and second words were new. The results indicate that, in addition to a repetition effect, unintentional learning of word pairs results in building new associations between previously unrelated words.

这项研究调查了无意学习语义上不相关的单词对对与事件相关的脑电势的影响。进行了两个实验，在这些实验的获取阶段，参与者听了五对语义上不相关的单词，每对重复20次。在实验1的测试阶段，这些“旧”对与包含其他单词的“新”对混合出现。在实验2的测试阶段，添加了第三个条件，其中成对的第一个单词是获取过程中出现的单词之一，而第二个单词是新单词。在这两个实验中，新单词对中的第二个单词引起N400和较晚（550-1000 ms）的正面积极性。与第一个单词和第二个单词都是新单词的情况相比，实验2中N400到新的第二个单词的幅度明显更大，这对单词中的第一个单词是一个旧的（以前学习过的单词）。结果表明，除了重复作用之外，单词对的无意识学习还导致在先前不相关的单词之间建立新的关联。