Doctoral Dissertation Research. Generating Alternatives: Processing Focus Structure in Discourse

本文的研究是对人们理解含有焦点词的话语的加工策略进行实验研究。在“Natalie only met LUCY”这样的句子中，焦点敏感粒子“only”的意义贡献在标准假设下有两个组成部分。首先是没有“only”的句子的意思，娜塔莉和露西的相遇。其次，由于焦点粒子的限制，没有替代与“only”相关的焦点值使句子为真，Natalie没有遇到除Lucy以外的任何人。众所周知，这类句子的意义是高度依赖上下文的。上下文决定了对句子的替代解释。这项研究调查了实时影响听众对备选方案的考虑的环境因素，换句话说，考虑到各种可用的信息来源，理解者如何找出最有可能的备选方案。实验将使用一个轻便的头戴式眼动仪来监测参与者在听包含焦点敏感元素（例如，“娜塔莉只买了一个苹果”）的句子时识别场景中的物体的眼球运动。参与者看了哪些物体，当他们看这些物体时，提供了证据，表明他们在解释句子时考虑了哪些可能的替代物。通过操纵视觉或语言上下文中可用的不同信息类型的可用性，可以询问这些潜在信息源中的每一个在多大程度上帮助听者将可选方案的域限制到可以挑选出单个预期参考对象的程度。这里描述的研究明显是跨学科的：这些问题是由理论语言学激发的，并使用实验心理学的方法进行研究。这项研究对认知科学家和理论语言学家来说都是有益的，因为它扩展了关于增量语言处理和语言期望的上下文来源的积累体，通过解决和提供关于领域限制这一非常普遍的问题的实验数据。这项研究将积极地让本科生参与科学研究，增加他们在科学领域进行研究生培训的可能性。

This dissertation research is an experimental investigation of the processing strategies people use to understand utterances containing focus particles. The meaning contribution of the focus-sensitive particle "only" in a sentence like "Natalie only met LUCY" has two components under standard assumptions. First, there is the meaning of the sentence without "only", Natalie's meeting of Lucy. Second, there is the restriction due to the focus particle that no alternative to the focus value associated with "only" makes the sentence true, Natalie did not meet anyone other than Lucy. As is well known, the meanings of such sentences are highly context-dependent. The context determines which alternatives the sentence is interpreted with respect to. This research investigates the contextual factors that influence a listener's consideration of alternatives in real time, in other words, how comprehenders figure out which alternatives are most likely, given the various information sources available to them. The experiments will use a lightweight head-mounted eye tracker to monitor eye movements as participants identify an object in a scene while listening to sentences containing focus-sensitive elements (e.g., "Natalie only bought an APPLE"). Which objects participants look at, and when they look at them, provides evidence about which referents they are considering as likely alternatives as they interpret the sentence. By manipulating the availability of different information types available in the visual or linguistic context, one can ask to what extent each of these potential information sources helps the listener restrict the domain of alternatives to the point that the single intended referent can be picked out. The research described here is notably interdisciplinary: the questions are motivated by theoretical linguistics and studied using methodologies from experimental psychology. This research in particular will be informative to both cognitive scientists, in that it extends the accumulating body of work on incremental language processing and the contextual sources of linguistic expectations, and theoretical linguists, by addressing and providing experimental data regarding the very general problem of domain restriction. The research will actively involve undergraduates in scientific research, increasing the likelihood that they will pursue graduate training in the sciences.