Computational and psycholinguistic investigations of covert dependencies

隐性依赖性的计算和心理语言学研究

• 批准号: 1451635
• 负责人: Ming Xiang
• 金额: $ 31.81万
• 依托单位: University of Chicago
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2015
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2015-07-01 至 2020-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1451635&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Computational; psycholinguistic; investigations; covert; dependencies

Language is a window into the inner working of the human mind. A great deal of previous work has examined how English speakers understand their mother tongue, and how English speaking children develop their reading, writing and conversational skills to become sufficient English users. Comparatively little is known about whether speakers of different languages adopt qualitatively or quantitatively different strategies in language communication. A good understanding of potential cross-linguistic differences bears directly upon a variety of important issues relevant for U.S. society, including the development of more efficient learning and teaching strategies for foreign languages, and of sophisticated technological tools to extract information from foreign text, websites, and written or spoken corpora. The language under investigation in this project is Mandarin Chinese, which, as the official language of China, is a language with significant national interest to the U.S., due to the growing influence of China's economic and political power. Chinese immigrants also form one of the largest foreign-born groups living in the United States. The particular empirical domain of the current project is on the structure of questions in Chinese. The project consists of two major components. First, a series of behavioral experiments will investigate how Chinese speakers, conditioned by the particular grammatical properties of the Chinese language, make decisions about how to best memorize, recall and anticipate linguistic information encoded in Chinese questions. Second, detailed computational and statistical models will be developed to provide a framework to explain these behaviors. Technological tools will also be developed to work with Chinese corpora. The combination of the behavioral and computational methods makes it possible to answer questions about what differences exist between English and Chinese, and how language users adapt to these differences so as to maximize communicative efficiency in each language. A substantial part of the project also includes training students in cutting-edge research questions, methods, and establishing close international collaboration with leading language researchers and institutions in China.

语言是通向人类思想内在工作的窗口。以前的大量工作已经研究了说英语的人如何理解他们的母语，以及说英语的孩子如何发展他们的阅读，写作和对话技巧，以成为足够的英国用户。 关于不同语言的说话者是在语言交流中采用定性或定量不同的策略，相对鲜为人知。 对潜在的跨语言差异的良好理解直接依赖于与美国社会相关的各种重要问题，包括开发更有效的外语学习和教学策略，以及从外国文本，网站，书面或口头语言中提取信息的复杂技术工具。该项目正在调查的语言是普通话中国人，作为中国的官方语言，由于中国的经济和政治权力的影响不断增长，因此它是一种对美国具有重大国家利益的语言。 中国移民还构成了居住在美国的最大外国出生群体之一。当前项目的特定经验领域是关于中文问题的结构。该项目由两个主要组成部分组成。首先，一系列的行为实验将调查中国说话者如何以中文的特定语法特性为条件，决定如何最好地记住，回忆和预期在中文问题中编码的语言信息。其次，将开发详细的计算模型，以提供解释这些行为的框架。技术工具还将开发用于与中国语料库合作。行为和计算方法的结合使得可以回答有关英语和汉语之间存在哪些差异的问题，以及语言用户如何适应这些差异，从而最大程度地提高了每种语言的交流效率。该项目的很大一部分还包括培训学生在尖端的研究问题，方法，并与中国领先的语言研究人员和机构建立密切的国际合作。