Prosody in Language Comprehension and Production

摘要这个项目的目的是通过研究韵律是如何产生和使用的，来探索语言处理系统的架构。更具体地说，目标是：(1)阐述最近由Ferreira（1993）提出的韵律生产模型，该模型反过来将揭示更多的全球生产模型；(2)利用该模型提出并验证了在听觉语言理解过程中韵律信息如何与句法和语义信息结合使用的假设；(3)开发一个测试听觉语言理解的在线任务，一个听觉模拟的移动窗口任务。此外，通过结合生产和理解的研究，本项目将阐明语言生产和理解系统之间的关系这一重要问题。建议的研究分为两个部分，一个是生产，一个是理解。生产实验采用一种范式，在这种范式中，参与者观看一张图片或回答一个问题，并根据刺激生成一个句子。这些旨在探索口语句子韵律的研究采用了一种范式，在这种范式中，说话者读一个句子，记住它，然后在收到提示时说出它。这些实验将探讨影响口语句子持续时间和音高特性的句法和语音因素。理解实验将使用费雷拉最近开发的一种叫做听觉移动窗口的技术，它可以测量一个句子的处理负荷。（为了比较听觉和视觉领域的句子加工，理解研究还将使用眼动监测和视觉移动窗口范式进行。）听者会听到一些包含韵律线索的句子，这些句子通常是由说话者为这些句子提供的，有或没有偏倚的词汇和上下文信息。这些研究的目的是研究这些信息源在听觉语言加工过程中如何相互作用。

9319272 Ferreira ABSTRACT The purpose of this project is to explore the architecture of the language processing system by examining how prosody is created and used. More specifically, the goals are to: (1) elaborate a model of prosodic production proposed recently by Ferreira (1993), which in turn will shed light on more global models of production; (2) use this model to develop and test hypothesis about how prosodic information might be used and integrated with syntactic and semantic information during auditory language comprehension; and (3) develop an online task for examining auditory language comprehension, an auditory analogue of the moving window task. In addition, by combining research in production and comprehension, this project will shed light on the important question of how the language production and comprehension systems are related. The proposed studies are divided into two sections, one on production and one on comprehension. The production experiments employ a paradigm in which participants view a picture or answer a question and generate a sentence in response to the stimulus. These studies designed to explore the prosody of spoken sentences employ a paradigm in which speakers read a sentence, memorize it, and produce it upon receipt of a cue. These experiments will examine the syntactic and phonological factors influencing the durational and pitch properties of spoken sentences. The comprehension experiments will use a technique Ferreira has recently developed called the Auditory Moving Window, which measures processing load across a sentence. (To allow comparison of sentence processing in the auditory and visual domains, the comprehension studies will also be conducted using eye movement monitoring and the visual moving window paradigms.) The listeners will hear sentences containing prosodic cues normally produced by speakers for those sentences, either with or without biasing lexical and contextual information. The goal of these studies is to examine how t hese sources of information interact during auditory language processing.