Doctoral Dissertation Research: Morphosyntactic and Interpretive Dependency Formation in Agreement Attraction

对于典型的成年母语人士来说，理解句子感觉很容易。事实上，我们从先前的研究中知道，理解是一个高度复杂的心理过程，需要说话者在巨大的时间压力下，将有关语言结构的复杂内隐知识与适当的感知和记忆操作协调起来。虽然人类在这项具有挑战性的任务上非常熟练，但他们有时会得出与他们收到的语言输入不一致的错误解释。了解导致神经正常的成年母语人士误解的机制，是更好地理解语言理解困难人群（如第二语言学习者或语言障碍患者）所经历的问题的重要一步。本研究旨在探讨记忆撷取错误在何种程度上导致句子加工中的误读。语言理解通常需要在不相邻的单词之间建立形态句法和解释关系，因此必须从记忆中检索较早的单词。例如，在“美丽的树旁边的男孩可能没有听到音乐”这句话中，动词“does”必须与主语“boy”在数量上保持一致，尽管在主语和动词之间有许多单词。记忆检索容易受到基于相似性的干扰。因此，先前的研究表明，理解者不太可能注意到在数量上与动词匹配的非主语名词（例如，“橱柜的钥匙是生锈的”）存在时，主谓一致的违反，可能是因为有时从记忆中错误地检索到与数字匹配的非主语名词，而不是目标。在这里，研究人员将使用评估实时语言理解的方法，如在阅读过程中跟踪眼球运动，以调查主谓一致的错误检索如何影响句子的解释。记忆提取的干扰与非熟练读者的理解困难有关，并且被认为是母语人士和第二语言学习者之间处理差异的主要来源。更好地理解记忆提取的基本特性是如何导致误解的，将有助于我们理解这些不太成功的语言使用者是如何影响语言理解的。

For typical adult native speakers, understanding sentences feels very easy. In fact, we know from prior research that comprehension is a highly complex mental process that requires speakers to coordinate sophisticated implicit knowledge about the structure of their language with the appropriate perceptual and memory operations under immense time pressure. While humans are remarkably skilled at this challenging task, they sometimes arrive at erroneous interpretations that are inconsistent with the linguistic input they received. Understanding the mechanisms that lead to misinterpretations in neurotypical adult native speakers is an important step towards a better understanding of the problems experienced by populations that have difficulties with language comprehension, such as second language learners or people with language disorders.This project investigates to what extent memory retrieval errors contribute to misinterpretation in sentence processing. Language comprehension frequently requires establishing morphosyntactic and interpretive relationships between non-adjacent words, such that the earlier word has to be retrieved from memory. For example, in the sentence 'The boy next to the beautiful trees probably does not hear the music', the verb 'does' has to agree in number with the subject head 'boy', even though many words intervene between the subject head and the verb. Memory retrieval is susceptible to similarity-based interference. Therefore, previous research has shown that comprehenders are less likely to notice subject-verb agreement violations in the presence of a non-subject noun that matches the verb in number (e.g., 'The key to the cabinets are rusty'), presumably because sometimes the number-matching non-subject noun is misretrieved from memory instead of the target. Here the researchers will use methods of evaluating real-time language comprehension such as tracking eye movements during reading to investigate how misretrieval in subject-verb agreement impacts the interpretation of the sentence. Interference in memory retrieval has been linked to comprehension difficulties in unskilled readers and has been proposed as the primary source of processing differences between native speakers and second language learners. A better understanding of how basic properties of memory retrieval can contribute to misinterpretations will help us understand how language comprehension is impacted for these less successful language users.