Linguistic structure in ellipsis and pronoun interpretation

在国家科学基金会的支持下，杰弗里·T·朗纳博士将进行为期三年的语言学研究，考察参与者如何解释包含一系列不同省略短语的句子。许多拟议的实验将使用轻型头盔眼球跟踪器来监控眼球运动，参与者在听描述所描述的活动时识别场景中的一个物体或一个人(例如，“保安开了锁，夜班看守也开了锁。”)。参与者看着哪个物体或人，以及当他们看着他们的时候，提供了他们在解释省略的表达时正在考虑哪些指称的证据。本研究的目的是：(A)调查在线和离线任务对这些表达的解释；(B)评估语法因素在多大程度上定义省略短语和代词的潜在指称集；以及(C)考察这些语法因素与语用和语篇因素的交互作用。这项研究的结果将对理解人们如何分配指称具有重要意义，这是当前理论语言学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表达来明确地解决这些问题。更好地理解参考解析也有助于其他领域的研究。参考消解是开发高效语言理解系统的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，有关眼球运动和语音的时间安排的信息，特别是与指代分辨率有关的信息，也将为正在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歧义单词和指代表达。此外，指称解决困难与脑损伤引起的某些语言障碍有关，并经常用于诊断，因此，更好地理解指导指称解决的语法和语篇因素可以为临床研究提供有用的基线。

With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Jeffrey T. Runner will conduct three years of linguistic research examining how participants interpret sentences containing a range of different elided phrases. 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., "The security guard opened the lock and the night watchman did, too."). 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 elided expressions. The goals of this research are to (a) investigate the interpretation of these expressions with on-line and off-line tasks; (b) evaluate the extent to which grammatical factors define the potential set of referents for elided phrases and pronouns; 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 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 expressions 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.