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关于说话者的语法约束知识如何指导在线口译过程的研究，了解说话者如何编码和导航结构化的心理表征。先前的研究发现，实时使用语法约束显示出成功和失败的显著不平衡。理解者在运用一些相当复杂的语法约束时表现出令人印象深刻的能力，但在其他一些人们可能认为相当容易的情况下，他们表现出惊人的不准确性。这种“选择性易错性”的特征在目前的理论模型下是出乎意料的，它为人们提供了一个机会，让人们对说话者如何在记忆中储存和操纵句子结构有了新的认识。该项目探讨的假设，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。该项目对比了两种语言记忆检索方法的预测：一种基于结构引导搜索，另一种基于内容寻址记忆中的并行线索检索。该项目包括六套研究的限制，如主谓一致，向前和向后的共指关系，绑定变量回指，负极性项目（NPI）许可，和空主题许可。实验采用了四种实验技术（自定进度阅读、事件相关脑电位（ERP）、快速语法判断和阅读过程中的眼动追踪）。该项目将收集关于英语、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。该项目解决了语言学，心理语言学和语言的认知神经科学的整合的基本挑战。人们通常认为，说话者在实时语言处理的压力下生存的机制与另一套捕获说话者语言可接受性判断的机制之间存在明确的分工。然而，如果可以将语言计算理解为实时计算，那么整合语言学，心理语言学和认知神经科学的关注就变得可行。该项目支持对学生进行基础广泛的培训，包括代表性不足的少数民族成员以及本科生和高中生。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伙伴关系，并将帮助开发葡萄牙语和巴西土著语言实验研究的基础设施。更广泛地说，通过阐明用于编码和导航健康成年人记忆中的结构化表征的详细机制，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。