Collaborative: Direct Impacts of Executive Functions on Language Comprehension: Evidence from Eye Movements and Electrophysiology

协作：执行功能对语言理解的直接影响：来自眼动和电生理学的证据

• 批准号: 2020490
• 负责人: Albert Kim
• 金额: $ 36.99万
• 依托单位: University of Colorado at Boulder
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2020
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2020-09-01 至 2024-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2020490&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Collaborative; Direct; Impacts; Executive; Functions

Human beings confront pervasive ambiguity in language as they listen and read. For example, two spoken words can sound nearly identical (e.g., “beach” and “peach”); sentences can be grammatically analyzed in multiple ways; and speech is often obscured by environmental sounds, as in a crowded restaurant. Although ambiguity routinely increases the risk of arriving at the wrong interpretation, or even no interpretation of a message, healthy young adults are marvelously adept at understanding language, vastly surpassing the capabilities of automatic systems despite major advances in machine learning. Explaining how humans understand language in the face of ambiguity, and why some populations fail, is a fundamental challenge for cognitive science, and is crucial for assisting people with language impairments that intensify under conditions of ambiguity, including stroke patients and healthy older adults with hearing loss. This research will use advanced neurophysiological and eye-tracking methods to illuminate how people regulate their interpretations of speech and language input by using executive functions (EF): the family of cognitive mechanisms that enable information processing in the brain and the flexible guidance of goal-directed behavior. EF are thought to be critical to helping people select among different interpretations of a sentence when more than one is possible, and for guiding the mind toward perceiving a word when the environment is “noisy.” However, the neural and cognitive mechanisms that allow EF to contribute to language comprehension are poorly understood. This project will elucidate EF’s role in language comprehension. This project will test the hypothesis that two particular forms of executive function – attention control and cognitive control – play fundamental and distinct roles in supporting language comprehension in the face of ambiguity. Attention control is hypothesized to regulate the collection of information by directing perceptual processing toward the intended signal, isolating it from noise under suboptimal listening conditions. Cognitive control is hypothesized to assist the revision of misinterpretations by guiding internal representations to align with relevant sources of evidence when multiple cues compete. The investigators will use neural oscillatory activity in scalp-recorded EEG to provide novel markers of cognitive control and attention control during cognitive task performance. Eye-movement patterns will be used to track participants’ interpretations of language input in real time, by recording the millisecond-level dynamics of listeners’ gaze while they listen to sentences and interrogate a scene before them. The combination of EEG and eye tracking will provide a multi-modal characterization of the neural processes and temporal nature of interpretation procedures during language comprehension. In order to illuminate how attention and cognitive control separately affect humans’ ability to deal with ambiguity, the experiments will manipulate the engagement status of these EF subtypes just prior to processing language, by having participants perform tasks, such as the Flanker task, which are known to recruit cognitive-control processes. This experimental approach will establish causal relationships between EF and language processing and will identify the distinctive contributions of cognitive control and attention control to comprehension.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.

人类在听和读的过程中会遇到语言中普遍存在的歧义。例如，两个口语单词听起来几乎相同（例如，“海滩”和“桃子”）;句子可以用多种方式进行语法分析;而且语音经常被环境声音所掩盖，就像在拥挤的餐馆里一样。虽然歧义通常会增加错误解释的风险，甚至对信息没有解释，但健康的年轻人非常擅长理解语言，尽管机器学习取得了重大进展，但远远超过了自动系统的能力。解释人类如何在模糊的情况下理解语言，以及为什么有些人群会失败，是认知科学面临的一个根本挑战，对于帮助语言障碍在模糊条件下加剧的人至关重要，包括中风患者和听力损失的健康老年人。这项研究将使用先进的神经生理学和眼动追踪方法来阐明人们如何通过使用执行功能（EF）来调节他们对语音和语言输入的解释：执行功能是一种认知机制，能够在大脑中进行信息处理并灵活指导目标导向行为。EF被认为是帮助人们在一个句子的不同解释中做出选择的关键，当一个句子可能有不止一种解释时，EF被认为是引导大脑在环境“嘈杂”时感知一个单词的关键。然而，允许EF有助于语言理解的神经和认知机制却知之甚少。这个项目将阐明EF在语言理解中的作用。这个项目将测试的假设，即两种特殊形式的执行功能-注意控制和认知控制-发挥基本和不同的作用，在支持语言理解，在面对歧义。注意力控制被假设为通过将感知处理引向预期信号来调节信息的收集，在次优的听力条件下将其与噪声隔离。假设认知控制，以协助修订的误解，指导内部表示，以配合相关的证据来源时，多个线索竞争。研究人员将使用头皮记录的EEG中的神经振荡活动来提供认知任务执行期间的认知控制和注意力控制的新标记。眼动模式将被用来跟踪参与者对真实的语言输入的解释，通过记录听众在听句子和询问他们面前的场景时的毫秒级目光动态。EEG和眼动追踪的结合将提供语言理解过程中神经过程和解释过程的时间性质的多模态表征。为了阐明注意力和认知控制如何分别影响人类处理歧义的能力，实验将在处理语言之前操纵这些EF亚型的参与状态，让参与者执行任务，例如Flanker任务，已知这些任务会招募认知控制过程。这个实验方法将建立EF和语言处理之间的因果关系，并将确定认知控制和注意力控制对理解的独特贡献。这个奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并被认为是值得通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估的支持。