簡單なる思考形態の適中法的再生について

抄録

When we learn foreign languages, we memorize the foreign words by pairing them with the corresponding words in our mother tongue. But when we try to recall the terms of such pairs according to the method of paired associates, it is usually easier to recall our national words from the presented foreign words than to recall in the reversed direction. This tendency is also seen in case of familiar words. As a matter of fact, when we compared the reaction of recalling our national words from German ones with that of recalling the German words from Japanese ones by using 100 common German words as materials and 8 psychologists as subjects in Experiment I, we found that the results were better in the former case than in the latter in respects both of reaction time and the rate of reproduction.
The purpose of this study was to explore the factors which determine the asymmetry of the rate of reproduction of such simple thought-configurations (i. e. pairs of words in our case) by means of the method of paired associates.
The procedure carried on throughout the experiments principally was this: The subjects were required to memorize the pairs of words consisting of several sorts of materials, and were subsequently asked to reproduce the one member of each pair when the other was given. The considerations of results about the asymmetry of the rate of reproductions in each experiment in connection with the qualities of materials used could be summarized as follows.
On which of the two members of any pair sujects laid stress, and the influence of the order of the members at the time of memorizing were not important factors (Experiment II, IX, and X). Such pair of words, in fact, cohered phenomenally in one single whole and formed one single thought-configuration, but at the same time each articulated member had a strong independent character. For these articulated members, the character of being a part of such weak contigulation was only the secondary one, and their peculiar character rather consisted in their relation to the systems of their backgrounds. For instance, with regard to 18 in the pair like 18-S, the character that it was a number and lied between 17 and 19 in the ordinal series was more peculiar to it than the character that it was being connected with S. As regards S, the character that it was one member of alphabet was also peculiar. As mentioned above, it was no wonder that the pair like this, consisting phenomenally of two units, was indeed one single segregated, figure-like pattern, but the “Lucke-Erganzung” of this configuration was strongly influenced by the field structure including the background, and not determined by the force within this configuration.
Dividing the meaningless syllables of equal sort in two groups, and pairing one group of them with meaningful syllables (a) and the other group with numerals (b), and of these groups repeatedly memorized. After being memorized completely, syllables in (a) had a meaning-character, while those in (b) had not. Then coupling again thus conditioned syllables in (a) and (b) in paires, we required the subjects to memorize these new paires and to reproduce them in accordance with the method of paired associates. The results showed that it was easier to reproduce syllables in (a) from the presented syllables in (b) than to reproduce in the reversed direction (Experiment VIII).
In short, in the thought-configuration in which one of its articulated member has the systematized background and the other has not, the reproduction in accordance with the method of paired associates, namely “Lucke-Erganzung”, is more favourably achieved when the latter comes first into consciousness.