Doctoral Dissertation Research: Computing agreement in a mixed system - A psycholinguistic comparison of subject and object agreement

这个项目调查了印地语中与言语一致相关的言语错误，印地语是一种广泛使用的语言，具有复杂的动词一致系统。说自己的母语通常并不觉得是一件特别困难或要求很高的任务：在大多数情况下，成年人说母语不会遇到任何明显的困难。尽管如此，许多关于语言产生的研究表明，这是一项高度复杂的认知任务，在将抽象概念翻译成我们可以用嘴或手交流的语言信息时，涉及许多心理过程。了解这些心理过程的本质对于理解如何开发更好的语言障碍治疗方法以及开发更复杂的自然语言技术都很重要。本项目通过调查印地语中的语音错误，有助于更好地了解语言产生的过程。语音错误是了解自然语言产生的最重要的来源之一。然而，大多数关于语言产生过程中语音错误的研究都集中在英语上，这可能限制了这项研究的范围。目前的项目填补了我们知识上的空白，通过调查印地语的语音错误，这种语言与英语有着非常不同的语法特性。此外，本项目提高了印地语在心理语言学研究中的知名度。印地语在语言产生和理解的心理语言学研究中仍未得到充分研究，尽管它有许多独特的语法特性，而且它是世界上使用人数第三多的语言，全世界有超过5亿人使用，仅在美国就有50多万。先前对欧洲语言的研究表明，说话者有时会在特定的语法语境中产生动词一致性错误。例如，在“the key to the cabinet is rusty”这句话中，由于受到复数名词“cabinet”的干扰，说英语的人有时会用错误的复数形式“are”而不是正确的“is”。研究表明，这种干扰对“干扰物”名词“橱柜”的结构特性非常敏感。然而，使语言表达突出并可能在语言生产过程中产生干扰的精确结构特性尚未得到很好的理解。印地语可以帮助阐明这一点。与其他研究过的语言不同，印地语有一个“混合”一致系统：在某些上下文中，动词与主语一致（如英语），而在其他上下文中，动词与宾语一致。在这里，研究人员将使用结构化实验，利用两种方法——口语生成范式和二元选择一致范式——来确定印地语使用者在主语一致配置和宾语一致配置中产生动词一致错误的情况。本研究将通过对主语一致和宾语一致错误模式的比较，揭示语言表达在语言产生过程中认知突出的因素。这些结果将对开发协议产生模型的心理语言学家和对说话者获得有关其母语的语法概括感兴趣的语言学家感兴趣。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This project investigates speech errors associated with the production of verbal agreement in Hindi, a widely-spoken language with a complex verb agreement system. Speaking one's native language does not usually feel like a particularly difficult or demanding task: in most situations adults do this without experiencing any noticeable difficulty. Despite this, much research into language production has shown that it is a highly complex cognitive task, and that there are many mental processes involved in translating an abstract idea to a linguistic message that we can communicate with our mouths or hands. Understanding the nature of these mental processes is important both for understanding how to develop better treatments for language disorders, as well as for developing more sophisticated natural language technology. The present project contributes to a better understanding of how language production proceeds by investigating speech errors in Hindi. Speech errors provide one of the most important sources of insight into natural language production. However, the majority of research into speech errors during language production is focused on English, potentially limiting the scope of this research. The present project fills a gap in our knowledge by investigating speech errors in Hindi, a language that has very different grammatical properties than English. In addition, the present project increases the visibility of Hindi for psycholinguistic research. Hindi remains highly understudied in psycholinguistic research on language production and comprehension, despite its many unique grammatical properties and the fact that it is the third most spoken language in the world, with over half a billion speakers worldwide and over half a million in the United States alone.Previous research on European languages has shown that speakers will sometimes produce verb agreement errors in certain grammatical contexts. For example, in the sentence 'the key to the cabinets is rusty', English speakers will sometimes produce the incorrect plural form 'are' instead of the correct is due to interference from the plural noun 'cabinets'. Research has shown that this interference is highly sensitive to the structural properties of the 'distractor' noun--'cabinets'. However, the precise structural properties that make a linguistic expression prominent and likely to create interference during language production are not well understood. Hindi can help shed light on this. Unlike other studied languages, Hindi has a 'mixed' agreement system: in some contexts, the verb agrees with the subject (as in English), and in others it agrees with the object. Here, the researchers will use structured experiments utilizing two methodologies--the spoken production paradigm and the binary choice agreement paradigm--to identify the circumstances under which Hindi speakers produce errors in verb agreement in both subject agreement configurations and object agreement configurations. In comparing error patterns for subject agreement and object agreement, this research will shed light on what factors make linguistic expressions cognitively prominent during language production. The results will be of interest to psycholinguists developing models of agreement production and to linguists interested in the grammatical generalizations that speakers acquire about their native language.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.