POWRE: Prosodic Influences on the Production and Comprehension of Syntactic Ambiguity in a Game-Based Conversation Task

这项研究旨在证明，在自然的对话环境中，天真的说话者会可靠地使用韵律(大致上指言语中的旋律)来组织他们提供给听者的信息，而听者反过来利用这种韵律结构来帮助说话者准确地恢复其意图。这项研究的总体目标是建立一个句子理解的心理语言学模型，其中韵律起着基础性的作用，通常决定着分配给一个句子的句法和语义解释。在这些实验中，参与者将玩一种合作的棋盘游戏，引发句法歧义句子的半自发产生。这个游戏涉及两个演讲者，每个人都有一个对方看不到的游戏板，他们必须使用一组有限的脚本句子来确定和交流联合动作。关键的话语包含句法上的歧义，比如“用三角形移动正方形”(意思是“用三角形推动正方形”或“移动房子形状的部分”)中含糊的介词短语。为了评估韵律的产生，演奏者的语音将被数字记录下来，并提交给语音和音系学分析。为了评估韵律在理解中的使用，玩家在听和理解对话并执行游戏动作时，将记录他们眼动的时间和注视位置。这些实验将使用头盔眼球跟踪，这是一项相对较新的技术，最近被证明对韵律和句法因素敏感，在实验中使用的是孤立的口语句子，这些句子指的是听者视觉场景中的对象。这种设备非常理想，因为它不会限制运动，不会引入额外的实验任务，也不会打断说或听。这项研究有两个新颖的方面。首先，游戏任务将参与者的注意力集中在交流的行为上，而不是阅读的过程上，可以更准确地描述天真的说话者之间自然对话中韵律的使用。最近在语言产出方面的研究表明，只有当说话者意识到歧义并得到明确的指示时，他们才会使用韵律来消除句法上的歧义，这意味着尽管听者可以使用韵律，但他们可能很少有机会这样做。然而，在这些研究中，说话者读的是记事卡上的句子。由于读者的语用目标与说话者在典型对话中的语用目标截然不同，这类任务可能会歪曲韵律消解的性质和程度。第二，游戏任务与头盔眼球追踪技术的结合将开发出一种亟需的新方法，它将提供一种时间上精确的在线理解测量方法，当理解作为半自发口语话语的一部分进行时，可以使用这种方法。这将使Speer能够研究韵律、句法和情景决定的话语变量在句子理解的时间过程中的相对影响问题，这构成了当前人类语言处理建模工作的核心。这笔POWRE赠款将允许斯佩尔购买一个头戴式系统，使她有机会利用这种她目前无法使用的新方法，并进行必要的探索性工作，以开始新的调查路线。这种方法论的可获得性将极大地提高她在研究计划的最基本层面上提供与重要理论问题相关的实证数据的能力，因此对她的职业发展非常重要。

This research is designed to demonstrate that naive speakers in a natural conversational situation reliably use prosody (loosely, the 'melody in speech') to structure the information they provide to listeners, and that listeners in turn make use of this prosodic structure to facilitate accurate recovery of the speaker's intended meaning. The broad objective of the research is to develop a psycholinguistic model of sentence comprehension in which prosody plays a fundamental role, often determining the syntactic and semantic interpretation assigned to a sentence. Participants in these experiments will play a cooperative board game that elicits semi-spontaneous productions of syntactically ambiguous sentences. The game involves two speakers, each with a game board the other cannot see, who must use to a limited set of scripted sentences to determine and communicate joint moves. Key utterances contain syntactic ambiguities such as the ambiguous prepositional phrase attachment in "Move the square with the triangle," (meaning either 'push the square with the triangle' or 'move the house-shaped piece.') To evaluate the production of prosody, players' speech will be recorded digitally and submitted to phonetic and phonological analysis. To evaluate the use of prosody in comprehension, the timing and fixation locations of players eyemovements will be recorded as they listen to and comprehend the conversation and implement the game moves. The experiments will use head-mounted eye tracking, a relatively new technology recently shown to be sensitive to prosodic and syntactic factors in experiments with isolated spoken sentences that refer to objects in the listeners' visual scene. The apparatus is ideal because it does not restrict movement, does not introduce an additional experimental task, and does not interrupt speaking or listening. There are two novel aspects to this research. The first is that the game task focuses the participants' attention on the act of communication rather than on the process of reading, and can provide a more accurate picture of the use prosody in natural conversation between naive speakers. Recent work in language production has argued that speakers use prosody to disambiguate syntax only when they are aware of the ambiguity and are given explicit instructions, implying that although listeners can use prosody, they may have few opportunities to do so. However, speakers in these studies read sentences from notecards. Because the pragmatic goals of a reader differ dramatically from those of speakers in typical conversation, such tasks may misrepresent the nature and extent of prosodic disambiguation. The second is that the combination of the game task with head-mounted eyetracking technology will develop a much-needed novel method that will provide a temporally-precise, on-line measure of comprehension that can be used while comprehension is occurring as part of semi-spontaneous spoken discourse. This will allow Speer to investigate the issues concerning the relative influence of prosodic, syntactic, and situationally-determined discourse variables over the time course of sentence comprehension, which form the core of current work in modeling human language processing. This POWRE grant will allow Speer to purchase a head-mounted system, providing her the opportunity to utilize this new methodology to which she currently has no access, and to conduct exploratory work necessary to begin a new line of inquiry. The availability of such methodology will greatly enhance her ability to provide empirical data relevant to important theoretical questions at the most basic level of her research program and thus will be highly important to the advancement of her career.