Structural and Pragmatic Constraints on the Interpretation of Reflexives and Pronouns

在美国国家科学基金会的支持下，杰弗里·T.亚军，艾尔西凯泽和迈克尔K。Tanenhaus将进行为期三年的语言学研究，研究英语，芬兰语和荷兰语的发言者如何解释两类重要的指代词：代词和反身代词。许多提议的实验将使用轻型头戴式眼动仪来监测眼睛运动，因为参与者在听所描绘的活动的描述时识别场景中的物体或人（例如，“约翰告诉比尔他/他自己的照片。").参与者看的是什么物体或人，以及他们什么时候看的，提供了他们在解释所指词语时考虑的是什么所指的证据。每种语言都有不同类型和数量的代词和反身代词。本研究的目的是（a）通过在线任务调查这些指称词的解释;（B）评估不同语言类型的语法因素在多大程度上定义了代词和反身代词的潜在指称集合;（c）检查这些语法因素与语用和语篇因素的相互作用。这项研究的结果对于理解不同语言的结构如何影响人们如何分配参考非常重要，这是当前理论和应用语言学研究的中心目标。很少有研究致力于使用一系列不同的语言来明确地解决这些问题。更好地理解参考分辨率也可以有益于其他领域的研究。参考分辨率是开发有效的语言理解系统中最核心和最具挑战性的问题之一，包括正在开发的用于与健康相关的生物医学应用的系统。此外，关于眼球运动和言语的时间信息，特别是与参考分辨率有关的信息，也将为开发基于计算机的语言理解系统的科学家提供信息，这些系统使用眼球运动来帮助解决模糊的单词和指涉表达。此外，在参考分辨率的困难与，并经常用于诊断，由于脑损伤而出现的某些语言困难，因此，更好地了解语法和话语因素指导参考分辨率可以证明是一个有用的基线临床研究。

With National Science Foundation support, Drs. Jeffrey T. Runner, Elsi Kaiser and Michael K. Tanenhaus will conduct three years of linguistic research examining how speakers of English, Finnish and Dutch interpret two important classes of referring words: pronouns and reflexives. Many of the proposed experiments will use a lightweight head-mounted eye tracker to monitor eye movements as participants identify an object or a person in a scene while listening to descriptions of the depicted activities (e.g., "John told Bill about the picture of him/himself."). Which object or person participants look at, and when they look at them, provides evidence about which referents they are considering as they interpret the referring words. Each of the languages has different types and numbers of pronouns and reflexives. The goals of this research are to (a) investigate the interpretation of these referring words with on-line tasks; (b) evaluate the extent to which grammatical factors which vary across the language types define the potential set of referents for pronouns and reflexives; and (c) examine the interaction of these grammatical factors with pragmatic and discourse factors. The results of this research will be important for understanding how the structure of different languages affects how people assign reference, which is a central goal of current research in theoretical and applied linguistics. Very little research has been devoted to using a range of different languages to explicitly address these questions. A better understanding of reference resolution can also benefit research in other domains. Reference resolution is one of the most central and challenging problems in developing efficient language understanding systems, including systems that are being developed for health-related bio-medical applications. Moreover, information about the timing of eye movements and speech, especially in relation to reference resolution, will also inform scientists who are developing computer-based language understanding systems that use eye movements to help resolve ambiguous words and referring expressions. Furthermore, difficulties in reference resolution are associated with, and often used to diagnose, certain language difficulties that arise due to brain damage, and thus a better understanding of the grammatical and discourse factors guiding reference resolution can prove a useful baseline for clinical research.