Doctoral Dissertation Research: Linguistic illusions and incremental interpretation

博士论文研究：语言错觉与增量解释

• 批准号: 2141348
• 负责人: Colin Phillips
• 金额: $ 1.66万
• 依托单位: University of Maryland, College Park
• 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: 2022-03-01 至 2024-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2141348&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Doctoral; Dissertation; Research; Linguistic; illusions

Adults are very good at understanding sentences quickly and easily. Psycholinguists often use their occasional mistakes as a way to understand the mechanisms that underlie this speed and ease. This project investigates two varieties of language comprehension errors, which reveal the underlying computations that allow language users to understand most sentences so successfully. The first of these errors involves the failure to notice anomalous word substitutions. For example, when asked "what is the name of the holiday during which children dress up and go door to door giving candy?", many people do not notice the substitution of "giving" for "receiving" and simply answer "Halloween". The failure to detect this type of word substitution can be thought of as a type of illusion - the comprehender imagines the sentence to be different from how it actually is. This project investigates what causes these illusions - for example, whether "giving" was simply mis-read, or if the meaning of the word was mis-remembered, or if attention was mis-directed toward other parts of the sentence. Identifying the processing mis-step that causes this particular error provides clues as to where comprehenders are vulnerable to misunderstanding more generally. The second case study concerns the processing of a special class of words known as negative polarity items or NPIs. These are words like "ever" and "any", which are generally appropriate in negative contexts (e.g. "John doesn’t have any money.") but sound strange or ungrammatical in positive contexts (e.g. "John has any money."). Prior work has shown that an NPI in a positive context can seem, at first glance, to be appropriate if there is a negative context nearby, another type of linguistic illusion. This project investigates the specific circumstances under which this mistaken perception arises, in addition to asking what people think these ungrammatical sentences actually mean when they judge them to be grammatical.This project uses a combination of speeded and unspeeded judgments, eye-tracking methods, and sentence repetition tasks to measure people’s responses to illusion sentences. Two initial experiments on word substitution illusions test how often mistakes occur when the substitution is in a declarative sentence instead of a question, and when the substituted word has been primed through previous exposure. Two independent experiments investigate the role of attention by measuring eye movements as comprehenders read sentences with various types of anomalies, including both word substitutions and spelling errors. Three additional experiments on NPI illusions investigate the causes and consequences of these errors. First, two experiments using speeded acceptability measures test the influence of broader conversational context and expectations on illusion rates, and the role of the precise timing of the appearance of the NPI. Finally, a sentence repetition experiment, in which subjects attempt to recall an NPI illusion sentence after a delay, reveals the inferred meaning of these sentences.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.

成年人非常擅长快速、轻松地理解句子。心理语言学家经常利用他们偶尔犯的错误来理解这种速度和舒适度背后的机制。这个项目调查了两种语言理解错误，揭示了让语言使用者如此成功地理解大多数句子的潜在计算。这些错误中的第一个是没有注意到异常的单词替换。例如，当被问及孩子们盛装打扮、挨家挨户送糖果的节日叫什么名字时，很多人没有注意到“给予”取代了“接受”，干脆回答“万圣节”。未能发现这种类型的单词替换可以被认为是一种错觉--理解者想象句子与实际情况不同。这个项目调查了是什么导致了这些错觉--例如，是不是简单地误读了“给予”，或者是单词的意思记错了，或者是注意力被错误地引导到了句子的其他部分。找出导致这一特定错误的处理失误提供了线索，以更普遍地了解理解者在哪里容易产生误解。第二个案例研究涉及被称为负极性项目或NPI的一类特殊词汇的加工。这些是像“ever”和“any”这样的词，通常用在否定语境中(例如：“约翰没有一分钱。”但在积极的语境中听起来奇怪或不合语法(例如“约翰有钱。”先前的研究表明，如果附近有另一种类型的语言错觉--负面语境，那么正面语境中的NPI乍一看似乎是合适的。这个项目调查了产生这种错误认知的具体情况，除了询问人们在判断这些不符合语法的句子是语法上的时候，他们认为它们实际上意味着什么。这个项目结合了快速和非快速判断、眼球跟踪方法和句子重复任务来测量人们对错觉句子的反应。两个关于单词替换错觉的初步实验测试了当替换出现在陈述句而不是疑问句中时，以及当替换的单词通过先前的暴露而被启动时，错误发生的频率。两个独立的实验通过测量理解者阅读有各种异常的句子时的眼动来研究注意力的作用，这些异常包括单词替换和拼写错误。另外三个关于NPI错觉的实验调查了这些错误的原因和后果。首先，使用快速可接受性测量的两个实验测试了更广泛的对话环境和期望对错觉比率的影响，以及NPI出现的准确时间的作用。最后，在句子重复实验中，受试者试图在延迟后回忆起NPI错觉句子，揭示了这些句子的推断含义。这一裁决反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。