Executive control in sentence production

在日常语言使用中，说话者能够毫不费力地造出句子，在遵循复杂的语法规则的同时，将多个单词编织在一起。句子产生的容易程度导致人们猜测，句子的产生可能不依赖于抑制控制等执行功能。这个项目旨在通过关注主谓一致的“吸引”错误来检验抑制控制是否在语法产生中起作用。在英语中，句子的主语和动词在数字上是一致的(例如，“狮子是红色的”，“狮子是红色的”)。当句子中包含的第二个名词的语法数字与主语名词不同时，就会出现吸引错误，例如在“鸟旁边的狮子是红色的。”理解抑制控制在句子产生中的作用可以为如何评估和治疗语言障碍以及如何为产生非成人式句法结构的儿童开发更有效的教学方法提供关键的见解。这项拟议的研究提供了将本科生和研究生聚集在一起进行医学和认知科学研究的机会，这项研究的结果将通过社区推广计划和失语症康复项目向更广泛的公众传播。本项目使用两种方法来研究主谓一致错误是否独立于执行(抑制性)控制。第一种方法结合了控制抑制需求的实验技术和先进的统计模型，以测试不同类型的抑制控制对防止吸引错误的贡献。其次，将实验扩展到6-8岁的儿童，以考察执行控制能力的发展如何与协议生产能力的发展轨迹相一致。

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.