Structure Generation in Language Comprehension

语言理解中的结构生成

• 批准号: 0848554
• 负责人: Colin Phillips
• 金额: $ 51.7万
• 依托单位: University of Maryland, College Park
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2009
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2009-07-01 至 2015-06-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0848554&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Structure; Generation; Language; Comprehension

This project aims to understand how speakers encode and navigate structured mental representations, through a series of studies of how speakers' knowledge of grammatical constraints guides online interpretation processes. Previous research has found that the real-time use of grammatical constraints shows a remarkably uneven profile of successes and failures. Comprehenders show impressive facility in deploying some rather complex grammatical constraints, but they show striking inaccuracy in other cases that one might expect to be rather easy. This "selective fallibility" profile is unexpected under current theoretical models, and it presents an opportunity for new insights into how speakers store and manipulate sentence structures in memory. The project explores the hypothesis that the uneven profile reflects the different contributions of prospective and retrospective memory search processes. The project contrasts the predictions of two approaches to linguistic memory retrieval: one based upon structure-guided search and another based upon parallel cue-based retrieval in content-addressable memory. The project consists of six sets of studies on constraints such as subject-verb agreement, forwards and backwards coreference relations, bound variable anaphora, negative polarity item (NPI) licensing, and null subject licensing. The experiments use four experimental techniques (self-paced reading, event-related brain potentials (ERPs), speeded grammaticality judgments, and eye-tracking during reading). The project will gather data on the processing of English, Spanish, Hindi, and Brazilian Portuguese. It will also support a new collaboration with researchers in Brazil. The project addresses a basic challenge to the integration of linguistics, psycholinguistics, and the cognitive neuroscience of language. It has been common to assume a clear division of labor between the mechanisms that speakers use to survive the pressures of real-time language processing, and another set of mechanisms that capture speakers' linguistic acceptability judgments. However, if it is possible to understand linguistic computation as real-time computation, then it becomes feasible to integrate the concerns of linguistics, psycholinguistics and cognitive neuroscience. The project supports broad-based training of students, including members of underrepresented minorities and undergraduate and high school students. The project will also create new international partnerships with teams of researchers in the UK, Germany, and Brazil, and will help to develop infrastructure for experimental research on Portuguese and the indigenous languages of Brazil. More broadly, by elucidating the detailed mechanisms used to encode and navigate structured representations in memory in healthy adults, the project will contribute to an understanding of normal and atypical language learning and age-related difficulties in language processing.

该项目旨在通过一系列对说话者对语法约束的了解指导在线解释过程的研究，了解说话者如何编码和导航结构化的心理表示。先前的研究发现，语法约束的实时使用表明，成功和失败的概况非常不平衡。理解者在部署一些相当复杂的语法约束时表现出令人印象深刻的设施，但是在其他情况下，他们可能会期望很容易出现惊人的不准确性。在当前的理论模型下，这种“选择性谬误”的轮廓是出乎意料的，它为扬声器如何存储和操纵句子结构在内存中提供了新的见解。该项目探讨了以下假设：不均匀的轮廓反映了前瞻性和回顾性记忆搜索过程的不同贡献。该项目将两种语言记忆检索方法的预测进行了对比：一个基于结构引导的搜索，另一个基于基于平行提示的可添加的可调性记忆中基于平行提示的检索。该项目包括六组关于限制的研究，例如主题 - 动词协议，向后和向后的核心关系，界限可变图，负极性项目（NPI）许可和无效主题许可。实验使用四种实验技术（自定进度的阅读，与事件相关的大脑电位（ERP），速度的语法判断以及阅读过程中的眼睛跟踪）。该项目将收集有关英语，西班牙语，印地语和巴西葡萄牙语处理的数据。它还将支持与巴西研究人员的新合作。该项目应对语言学，心理语言学和语言的认知神经科学的整合面临基本挑战。通常，在说话者用来在实时语言处理压力的机制之间进行明确的劳动划分，以及捕捉说话者语言可接受性判断的另一种机制。但是，如果有可能将语言计算理解为实时计算，那么将语言学，心理语言学和认知神经科学的关注融为一体就可以了。该项目支持对学生的广泛培训，包括代表性不足的少数民族以及本科生和高中生的成员。该项目还将与英国，德国和巴西的研究人员团队建立新的国际合作伙伴关系，并将有助于开发基础设施，以实验葡萄牙语和巴西土著语言。更广泛地说，通过阐明用于编码健康成人记忆中结构化表示的详细机制，该项目将有助于理解正常和非典型语言学习以及语言处理中与年龄相关的困难。