Doctoral Dissertation Research: The interaction between conceptual combination and linguistic structure

博士论文研究：概念组合与语言结构的相互作用

• 批准号: 2140741
• 负责人: Liina Pylkkanen
• 金额: $ 1.67万
• 依托单位: New York University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2022
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2022-03-15 至 2023-02-28
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2140741&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Doctoral; Dissertation; Research; interaction; between

The last decade of research into how the brain composes meaning has shown that a stronger driver of brain activity corresponds to the conceptual and meaning-based aspects of words rather than their abstract linguistic properties. That is, when combining the words 'blue' and 'hat' to form the more complex mental representation of 'a blue hat', the conceptual meaning of 'blue' (a color adjective, where the word it modifies is blue) seems to drive an increase in brain activity in regions associated with meaning and composition, but the word's linguistic status as a modifier is not the primary driver of this activity. This observation invites linguists to adapt existing theories about how people use language structure to include conceptual meaning. The project examines this by developing a series of studies that vary the structure of English sentences either while keeping the conceptual meaning relatively constant or while using those structural cues to vary which words can combine to form a new meaning. The primary study funded by this NSF grant measures word composition by using magnetoencephalography (MEG) to compare, for example, the neural representation of the word 'hat' in across sentences like (a) "The hat is a really pretty blue color" and (b) "The hat is near a really pretty blue lamp", where the key difference is that in (a) but not (b), the words 'hat' and 'blue' must combine to form the representation of 'a blue hat'. Words are presented visually one-at-a-time on a screen while the researchers record participants' brain activity. They then use a machine learning based approach to study at which points in the sentence the brain is still actively representing the word 'hat' after it has been presented. The researchers hypothesize that if it is necessary that the brain activates the full representation of a word in order to combine with another concept, then they should be able to accurately identify the representation for a word like 'hat' immediately after the word 'blue' is presented in sentences like (a), but not in sentences like (b). This study would be the first to provide direct evidence that such word-level re-activation can be triggered by certain sentence structures and inform psycholinguistic models of sentence processing. The project includes the training of undergraduate students in STEM research.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.

关于大脑如何构成含义的最后十年的研究表明，更强大的大脑活动驱动力对应于单词的概念和基于意义的方面，而不是其抽象的语言特性。也就是说，当结合“蓝色”和“帽子”一词以形成“蓝色帽子”的更复杂的心理表示时，“蓝色”的概念含义（一种颜色形容词，它修改为蓝色的单词是蓝色的单词）似乎会推动与含义和构图相关的区域中大脑活动的增加，但是单词的语言状态作为一种修改的范围不是此活动的主要驱动力。该观察邀请语言学家调整有关人们如何使用语言结构来包括概念含义的现有理论。该项目通过开发一系列研究来研究这一点，这些研究可以改变英语句子的结构，同时保持概念含义相对稳定，或者在使用这些结构提示来改变哪些单词可以结合以形成新含义的同时。由这项NSF授予资助资助的主要研究通过使用磁脑电图（MEG）进行衡量单词组成，例如比较（例如，“帽子”（a）“帽子是一个非常漂亮的蓝色”和“帽子”（b）“帽子是一个非常漂亮的蓝色灯”，帽子的差异是（a），但在（a）中，蓝色是（a），''''帽子是一件非常漂亮的蓝色，但''''hat of（a）'帽子'。在研究人员记录参与者的大脑活动时，单词在屏幕上以视觉上的视觉呈现。然后，他们使用基于机器学习的方法来研究句子中的句子中哪些点在呈现后仍在主动表示“帽子”一词。研究人员假设，如果有必要大脑激活一个单词的完整表示以与另一个概念结合，那么在（a）之类的句子中呈现“蓝色”一词之后，他们应该能够准确地识别一个单词的表示，而不是（a）之类的句子，而不是在句子（例如（b）之类的句子中）。这项研究将是第一个提供直接证据，表明某些句子结构可以触发这种单词级别的重新激活并为句子处理的心理语言模型提供信息。该项目包括在STEM研究中对本科生的培训。该奖项反映了NSF的法定任务，并被认为是值得通过基金会的知识分子优点和更广泛影响的评论标准来评估值得支持的。