Structural Dependency in Language Production

这项研究旨在阐明在语言产生过程中实现远距离依赖的心理语言学过程。这种依赖构成了相当大的理论挑战，因为可靠地形成不连续元素所需的抽象结构知识并不直接与逐字递增的生产的发音要求相吻合。要考察的依存关系主要是主语和动词之间的数量一致，其次是主语和主语回指之间的数量一致。由于英语中的动词一致可以从非语言信息、词汇、词法和其他来源中调用一系列关于数的信息，因此它提供了许多机会来考察语言产生过程中信息的传递和相互作用。相反，由于它表现出严格的句法制约，它提供了观察信息传递和交互的限制条件的机会。对信息传递的性质和可能运行的约束类型的预测源于Garrett(1975,1988)提出的生产方法，并由其他人详细阐述(Bock，1987A；Lapointe，1985；Lapointe和Dell，1989；Levelt，1989)。实验采用协议错误引出任务和时间发音任务相结合的方式，探讨协议操作中使用的数字信息的性质、主语识别和维持操作的性质以及协议执行的加工要求。

The research is designed to illuminate the psycholinguistic processes involved in implementing long-distance dependencies during language production. Such dependencies constitute a considerable theoretical challenge, since the abstract structural knowledge required to reliably format the discontinuous elements does not straightforwardly mesh with the articulatory requirement of incremental, word-by-word production. The dependencies to be explored are, primarily, number agreement between subjects and verbs, and, secondarily, number agreement between subjects and subject anaphors. Because verb agreement in English may call on a range of information about number from the nonlinguistic message, from the lexicon, from the morphology, and from other sources, it offers many opportunities to examine the transmission and interaction of information during language production. Conversely, because it exhibits strict syntactic conditioning , it offers opportunities to observe constraints on the transmission and interaction of information. Predictions about the nature of information transmission and the types of constraints likely to operate are derived from an approach to production developed by Garrett (1975, 1988) and elaborated by others (Bock, 1987a; Lapointe, 1985; Lapointe and Dell, 1989; Levelt, 1989). The experiments employ agreement-error elicitation tasks inn tandem with time pronunciation tasks to explore the nature of the number information used in the agreement operation, the nature of subject identification and maintenance operations, and the processing demands of agreement implementation.