Making Syntax of Sense

在国家科学基金会的支持下，凯瑟琳·博克博士将进行为期三年的心理语言学研究，研究正常自然言语中产生数字和性别一致的认知过程。该项目将使用实验室任务来比较英语、荷兰语和俄语中的协议，这些任务衡量的是与动词和代词产生协议相关的准确性、时间性、注意力轨迹和认知需求。这项研究探讨了说话者如何默契地识别数字和性别的概念和知觉先导，并检验了在与说话相关的典型时间压力下，数字和性别信息是如何使用的相互矛盾的观点。数字和性别一致的手段是心理上属于同一句子的部分的语言标志，起到了沟通意义和说话人用来表达思想的话语的语法形式的作用。这座桥走得很好：即使是在英语这种协议要求相对简单的语言中，说话者在每五秒钟的演讲中也会不止一次调用执行协议的操作。此外，尽管直觉与之相反，但共识出人意料地可靠。到4岁时，正常、自发地使用数字协议几乎有95%是正确的。其含义是，对协议工作原理的解释可以增强我们目前可以忽略不计的科学理解，即人类的感知和概念是如何转化为一种媒介，使它们能够准确地与其他人交流。

With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Kathryn Bock will conduct three years of psycholinguistic research on the cognitive processes involved in producing number and gender agreement in normal spontaneous speech. The project will compare agreement in English, Dutch, and Russian using laboratory tasks that measure the accuracy, timing, locus of attention, and cognitive demands associated with the production of agreement in verbs and pronouns. The research addresses how speakers tacitly identify the conceptual and perceptual precursors of number and gender and tests competing views about how number and gender information are used when producing agreement under the typical time-pressures associated with speaking.The devices of number and gender agreement are linguistic flags to the parts of sentences that belong together mentally, serving to bridge meaning and the grammatical form of the utterances that speakers use to express their thoughts. The bridge is well travelled: Even in English, a language with relatively simple agreement requirements, speakers call on the operations that implement agreement more than once in every five seconds of running speech. Also, despite intuitions to the contrary, agreement is surprisingly reliable. By the age of 4, the normal, spontaneous use of number agreement is almost 95% correct. The implication is that an explanation of the workings of agreement can enhance our currently negligible scientific understanding of how human perceptions and conceptions are transformed into a medium that allows them to be communicated with precision to other people.