Compositional Processes in Language Understanding

在国家科学基金会的支持下，Brian McElree博士将对人们对简单和复杂表达的解释进行为期三年的心理语言学研究。语言理解需要从单个单词的识别到对完整文本或话语进行适当解释的操作。最近的正式分析表明，复杂的操作需要得到一个上下文合适的解释，即使是常见的和看似简单的表达式。这些操作似乎修改了对单个成分的默认解释，并且它们经常生成在句子或话语中没有明确表示的语义内容。这个项目旨在确定语言理解中使用的过程和知识结构，并确定一些组合过程是否利用当地的词汇属性，而不是世界知识。实验将分离简单和丰富的组成形式，从而确定区分这些不同形式的组成的属性。句子加工的在线测量（眼动模式、自定节奏的阅读时间和从速度-准确性权衡过程中得出的时程函数）将对比假设依赖于不同类型的信息和参与不同类型的合成操作的表达。实验将研究局部（短语内部）和全局约束如何影响作文，以及作文过程中是否存在以上下文不敏感的方式操作的方面。这个项目将促进我们对词汇和句法处理与语篇和语篇理解之间关键界面的理解。这项研究也应该对形式语言学理论以及有效的自然语言理解系统的发展产生影响。此外，由于一些失语症患者在理解需要丰富成分的表达方面表现出选择性缺陷，这项研究也有助于描述特定语言障碍，并阐明服务于语言处理的神经结构。该项目还将为本科生提供宝贵的研究经验，并为博士后学生提供高级培训。

With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Brian McElree will conduct three years of psycholinguistic research on people's interpretation of simple and complex expressions. Language comprehension requires operations ranging from the identification of individual words to the construction of a suitable interpretation for a complete text or utterance. Recent formal analyses suggest that complex operations are needed to derive a contextually suitable interpretation of even common and seemingly simple expressions. These operations appear to modify default interpretations of individual constituents, and they often generate semantic content that is not explicitly represented in the sentence or discourse. This project seeks to identify the processes and knowledge structures used in language comprehension, and to determine whether some compositional processes draw on local lexical properties rather than world knowledge. Experiments will dissociate simple and enriched forms of composition and so identify the properties that distinguish these different forms of composition. On-line measures of sentence processing (eye-movement patterns, self-paced reading times, and time-course functions derived from the speed-accuracy tradeoff procedure) will contrast expressions hypothesized both to depend on different types of information and to engage different kinds of compositional operations. The experiments will examine how local (phrase-internal) and global constraints affect composition, and whether there are aspects of the compositional process that operate in a context-insensitive manner.This project will advance our understanding of the critical interface between lexical and syntactic processing on one hand and discourse and text comprehension on the other. The research should also have implications for formal linguistic theory, as well as for the development of efficient natural language understanding systems. Moreover, as some aphasics show selective deficits in understanding expressions requiring enriched composition, this research may also aid in the characterization of particular language disorders and illuminate the neural structures serving language processing. The project will also provide valuable research experience for undergraduates and advanced training for postdoctoral students.