Doctoral Dissertation Research: Investigating the role of distribution in syntactic comprehension

人们在日常语言使用中，无论是通过阅读还是口语对话，都会遇到各种各样的句法结构。在某些情况下，句子可能是模棱两可的，有不止一个意思。例如，在“The spy saw The man with The双筒望远镜”中，一种解释是间谍正在通过双筒望远镜看东西，而另一种解释是这个人有双筒望远镜。然而，尽管存在这种模糊性，人们仍然能够集中在一个单一的解释上。这背后的机制至今仍有争议，因为许多因素已被证明可以指导理解。本论文项目将探讨不熟悉结构的经验如何影响语言处理。经验被认为在理解中起着很大的作用，然而，尽管它在理论模型中起着很大的作用，仍然没有直接的证据表明人们是否真的跟踪分布，即目标结构和竞争结构的相对频率。这个博士论文项目研究了人们是否可以通过直接操纵句法结构的相对频率来隐性获取句法分布信息，同时保持总体暴露不变：一个不熟悉的方言结构（“饭需要煮熟”，“饭需要煮熟”的一种变体）相对于另一个竞争结构（“饭需要煮熟的蔬菜”）的概率。方言结构主要与宾夕法尼亚州西部的一种方言有关，这个地区以外的大多数人都不熟悉。在一系列实验中，采用自定节奏阅读来测试是否随着时间的推移，方言结构的比例越高，处理难度越小。研究者还测试了从动词“需要”中得到的分布信息是否可以推广到一个相关的动词（即“需要”）。“希望”)。这个项目将为语言学习理论提供信息，因为与之前的研究相比，它提供了更有力的分布式学习测试。它还寻求对语法和阅读理解的最佳学习策略具有实际意义。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。

People encounter a variety of syntactic structures in everyday language use, whether through reading or spoken conversation. In some cases, sentences can be ambiguous and have more than one meaning. For example, in "The spy saw the man with the binoculars", one interpretation is that the spy is looking through the binoculars, while an alternative interpretation is that the man has the binoculars. Yet, despite this ambiguity, people are still able to converge on a single interpretation. The mechanisms behind this are still debated today as many factors have been shown to guide comprehension. This dissertation project will investigate how experience with an unfamiliar structure affects language processing. Experience is thought to play a large role in comprehension, however, despite its large role in theoretical models, there is still no direct evidence of whether people actually keep track of distribution i.e., the relative frequency of a target structure and competing structures. This doctoral dissertation project investigates whether people can implicitly acquire syntactic distributional information by directly manipulating the relative frequency of syntactic structures while holding overall exposure constant: the probability of an unfamiliar, dialectal structure ("The meal needs cooked", a variation of "The meal needs to be cooked") relative to another competing structure ("The meal needs cooked vegetables"). The dialectal structure is mainly associated with a dialect from Western Pennsylvania, and is unfamiliar to most people outside of this region. In a series of experiments, self-paced reading is used to test whether a higher proportion of the dialectal structure leads to less processing difficulty over time. The investigators also test whether the distributional information from the verb "needs" can be generalized to a related verb (i.e. "wants"). This project will inform theories of language learning as it provides a stronger test of distributional learning compared to previous studies. It also seeks to have practical implications for optimum learning strategies for grammar and reading 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.