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NSF-BSF: Bridging encoding and retrieval perspectives on sentence processing errors: Comparing Hebrew and English

NSF-BSF：桥接句子处理错误的编码和检索视角：比较希伯来语和英语

基本信息

批准号：
2146798
负责人：
Brian Dillon
金额：
$ 22.7万
依托单位：
University of Massachusetts Amherst
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：
2022-04-01 至 2025-03-31
项目状态：
未结题

来源：
https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2146798&HistoricalAwards=false
关键词：
NSF BSF Bridging encoding retrieval

项目摘要

To understand language, people need to form links between words that are far apart. For example, the sentence "The dog with the very shiny and healthy black fur doesn’t usually bark" requires the listener or reader to associate the dog with bark, even though those words are quite far apart. To do this, language users need to rely on memory to link words and concepts. However, human memory is famously prone to error: Humans routinely forget, misremember, and conflate aspects of their experience. In the context of language understanding, these memory failures can lead to incorrect interpretations of sentences. This project aims to understand how and why memory can distort reading and language comprehension by looking at how memory errors impact users of two very different languages, English and Hebrew. English and Hebrew differ in how they organize the words within sentences and whether they assign gender to nouns; Hebrew assigns masculine and feminine genders to nouns, similar to languages like Spanish and French but unlike English. The researchers will study how these linguistic differences between Hebrew and English influence when interpretation errors will arise in users of these two languages. In doing so, the researchers will try to uncover characteristics of memory errors that have the same effect on understanding across languages and those that are language-specific. The results of this project will be used to understand how human memory systems support real-time language comprehension.Research on this question suggests that two kinds of processes can disrupt language comprehension when a sentence requires the reader to hold multiple words in memory. One process occurs when the features of more recent words accidentally overwrite parts of earlier words. This type of ‘encoding error’ means that the reader erroneously perceives a word that recombines the features of two different words. For example, in a sentence like “The road to the mountains was blocked,” they may misremember "road" as "roads" by combining the singular “road” with the plural feature of “mountains.” Another type of error can arise when trying to retrieve a particular word from memory. For example, a reader or listener might pick out the wrong word from memory at the critical moment in understanding a sentence, thinking that the mountains were blocked in the sentence above, rather than the road (a ‘retrieval’ error). Language comprehension can in principle be disrupted by either or both of these processes. The investigators will track eye movements of people while they are reading in English and Hebrew and collect speeded acceptability judgments. Together these measures should reflect the relative contribution of encoding and retrieval errors in both languages. The particular pattern of comprehension errors that arises in reading will then be tested against computational models of human working memory in language processing. The combination of these two research methods will help account for how people understand sentences so easily most of the time, and why misinterpretations can and do arise at other times. Understanding how and when interpretation errors arise can also help us better understand various atypical language and reading patterns, such as shown in dyslexia. This project will advance collaboration between American and Israeli language researchers and will involve advanced STEM training for researchers at different career stages, from undergraduates to post-doctoral scholars.This project was co-funded by PAC, Linguistics, and EHR Core 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.

为了理解语言，人们需要在相距甚远的单词之间形成联系。例如，句子“The dog with the very shiny and healthy black fur doesn 't usually bark”要求听者或读者将狗与树皮联系起来，即使这些词相距很远。要做到这一点，语言使用者需要依靠记忆来联系单词和概念。然而，人类的记忆是出了名的容易出错：人类经常忘记、记错和混淆他们经历的各个方面。在语言理解的背景下，这些记忆失败可能导致对句子的错误解释。该项目旨在了解记忆如何以及为什么会扭曲阅读和语言理解，通过观察记忆错误如何影响两种非常不同的语言，英语和希伯来语的用户。英语和希伯来语在句子中如何组织单词以及是否为名词分配性别方面有所不同;希伯来语为名词分配阳性和阴性，类似于西班牙语和法语，但不同于英语。研究人员将研究希伯来语和英语之间的这些语言差异如何影响这两种语言的使用者出现口译错误。在这样做的过程中，研究人员将试图揭示记忆错误的特征，这些特征对跨语言和特定语言的理解具有相同的影响。该项目的结果将用于了解人类记忆系统如何支持实时语言理解。对这个问题的研究表明，当一个句子需要读者在记忆中记住多个单词时，两种过程会破坏语言理解。一个过程发生在较新单词的特征意外覆盖较早单词的部分时。这种类型的“编码错误”意味着读者错误地感知到一个单词，该单词将两个不同单词的特征重新组合在一起。例如，在“The road to the mountains was blocked”这样的句子中，他们可能会把单数的“road”和复数的“mountains”组合在一起，从而把“road”误记为“roads”。当试图从记忆中检索特定单词时，可能会出现另一种类型的错误。例如，读者或听众可能在理解一个句子的关键时刻从记忆中挑出错误的单词，认为上面的句子中的山被挡住了，而不是道路（“检索”错误）。原则上，语言理解可以被这两个过程中的一个或两个破坏。研究人员将跟踪人们在阅读英语和希伯来语时的眼球运动，并收集快速的可接受性判断。这些措施应反映在两种语言的编码和检索错误的相对贡献。在阅读中出现的理解错误的特定模式，然后将测试对人类工作记忆在语言处理的计算模型。这两种研究方法的结合将有助于解释人们如何在大多数时候如此容易地理解句子，以及为什么在其他时候会出现误解。了解口译错误是如何以及何时出现的，也可以帮助我们更好地理解各种非典型语言和阅读模式，如阅读障碍。该项目将促进美国和以色列语言研究人员之间的合作，并将为不同职业阶段的研究人员提供高级STEM培训，从本科生到博士后学者。该项目由PAC，Linguistics和EHR Core Research共同资助。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并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，被认为值得支持。