Computational and psycholinguistic investigations of covert dependencies

语言是一扇了解人类内心活动的窗户。以前的大量工作已经研究了讲英语的人如何理解他们的母语，以及讲英语的儿童如何发展他们的阅读，写作和会话技能，成为足够的英语用户。 不同语言的使用者在语言交际中所采用的策略是否存在质的或量的差异，目前尚不清楚。 对潜在的跨语言差异的良好理解直接关系到与美国社会相关的各种重要问题，包括制定更有效的外语学习和教学策略，以及从外国文本，网站和书面或口头语料库中提取信息的复杂技术工具。在这个项目中，被调查的语言是普通话，作为中国的官方语言，这是一种对美国有重大国家利益的语言，由于中国经济和政治实力的影响力日益增强。 中国移民也是居住在美国的最大的外国出生群体之一。本研究的具体实证领域是汉语问句的结构。该项目包括两个主要部分。首先，一系列的行为实验将研究汉语使用者如何在汉语语法特性的制约下，决定如何最好地记忆、回忆和预测汉语问句中编码的语言信息。其次，将开发详细的计算和统计模型，以提供一个框架来解释这些行为。还将开发与中国语料库合作的技术工具。行为方法和计算方法的结合使我们有可能回答英语和汉语之间存在哪些差异，以及语言使用者如何适应这些差异，以最大限度地提高每种语言的交际效率。该项目的重要组成部分还包括培训学生掌握前沿研究问题和方法，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。

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.