Structure Generation in Language Comprehension

这个项目旨在通过一系列关于说话者的语法限制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，语法约束的实时使用显示出成败参差不齐的情况。理解者在部署一些相当复杂的语法约束方面表现出令人印象深刻的熟练，但在其他情况下，他们表现出惊人的不准确，人们可能会认为这相当容易。在目前的理论模型下，这种“选择性错误”特征是意想不到的，它为研究说话者如何在记忆中存储和操纵句子结构提供了一个新的机会。该项目探索了一种假设，即不均匀的轮廓反映了前瞻性和回溯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基于平行线索的检索。该项目包括六组关于限制条件的研究，如主谓一致、前后共指关系、约束变量回指、负极性项(NPI)许可和空主语许可。实验使用了四种实验技术(自定节奏阅读、事件相关脑电位(ERPs)、快速语法判断和阅读过程中的眼球跟踪)。该项目将收集英语、西班牙语、印地语和巴西葡萄牙语的处理数据。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、心理语言学和语言认知神经科学的整合所面临的基本挑战。人们普遍认为，说话人用来承受实时语言处理压力的机制和另一套捕捉说话人语言可接受性判断的机制之间存在明显的分工。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了。该项目支持对学生进行广泛的培训，包括代表人数不足的少数群体成员以及本科生和高中生。该项目还将与英国、德国和巴西的研究团队建立新的国际伙伴关系，并将帮助发展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，通过阐明健康成年人记忆中用于编码和导航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。

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.