Executive control in sentence production

在日常语言使用中，说话者能够毫不费力地说出句子，将多个单词编织在一起，同时遵循复杂的语法规则。句子产生的容易性导致了人们的猜测，即句子的产生可能不依赖于执行功能，如抑制控制。本研究旨在通过考察主谓一致的“吸引”错误来检验抑制控制是否在语法产出中发挥作用。在英语中，句子的主语与动词的数一致（例如，“狮子是红色的”，“狮子是红色的”。 当句子中包含第二个名词时，吸引错误就会出现，而第二个名词的语法数量与主语名词不同，比如“鸟旁边的狮子是红色的”。“理解抑制控制在句子生成中的作用可以为如何评估和治疗语言障碍提供关键见解，以及如何为产生非成人句法结构的儿童开发更有效的教学方法。拟议的研究提供了机会，汇集医学和认知科学研究的本科生和研究生，这项研究的结果将通过社区外展计划和失语症康复项目传播给更广泛的公众。本研究采用两种方法来探讨主谓一致错误是否独立于执行（抑制）控制。第一种方法使用的实验技术，操纵抑制需求与先进的统计建模相结合，以测试不同类型的抑制控制的吸引力错误的预防的贡献。其次，本研究以6 ~ 8岁儿童为被试，探讨了执行控制能力的发展与一致性产生能力的发展轨迹之间的关系。

In everyday language use, speakers are able to produce sentences effortlessly, weaving together multiple words while following complex grammatical rules. The ease with which sentences are produced has led to speculations that sentence production may not rely on executive functions such as inhibitory control. This project aims to test whether inhibitory control plays a role in grammatical production by focusing on subject-verb agreement 'attraction' errors. In English, the subject of the sentence agrees with the verb in number (e.g., "The lion is red," "The lions are red"). Attraction errors arise when the sentence contains a second noun with a different grammatical number than the subject noun, as in "The lion next to the birds ARE red." Understanding the role of inhibitory control in sentence production could provide key insights on how to evaluate and treat language impairments, as well as how to develop more effective pedagogical methods for children who produce non-adult-like syntactic structures. The proposed research provides opportunities to bring together undergraduate and graduate students in medical and cognitive science research, and the outcome of this research will be disseminated to the broader public through community outreach programs and aphasia rehabilitation projects. This project uses two approaches to investigate whether subject-verb agreement errors are independent of executive (inhibitory) control. The first approach uses a combination of experimental techniques that manipulate inhibitory demand with advanced statistical modeling to test the contribution of different types of inhibitory control to the prevention of attraction errors. Second, the experiments are extended to 6- to 8-year-old children to investigate how the development of executive control abilities aligns with the developmental trajectory of agreement production abilities.