Doctoral Dissertation Research: Morphological Dependencies

这个项目调查了一种语言的使用者如何知道一个词可以采取的各种形式。几十年来，语言学家已经确定，说话者可以学习和概括语言中的统计趋势，创造出他们以前从未遇到过的新形式的单词。另一方面，在某些情况下，说话者必须记住不遵循共同模式的个别形式的行为。这个项目探讨了概括和记忆之间的相互作用，通过研究说话者是否考虑到一个词的一种形式时，弄清楚如何使另一种形式。它的目的是表明说话人可以形成这些类型的概括，从而提高我们对说话人如何学习和维持复杂系统的理解，在这个系统中，一个词可以出现在许多不同的形式中。在这个项目中研究的四种语言中，每一种都涉及一个词的两种形式表现出不可预测性的情况：如果一个词在一个上下文中带后缀A，那么它在不同的上下文中也可能带后缀B。这些统计趋势将首先通过分析该语言的词典或语料库来建立。接下来，将与相关语言的说话者进行一系列实验。在每一个实验中，说话者将被展示在一些上下文中具有不同后缀的他们的语言中看似合理但未经证实的单词，并被要求提供额外的后缀形式。给定的形式将有所不同;这一假设是，说话者也会类似地改变他们为新形式选择的后缀，大致模仿他们语言的统计趋势。为了解释这些相关性，该项目开发了一种理论方法，在该方法中，一个词的形式与该词的心理输入上的标记相关联，并且说话者学习概括哪些标记集倾向于在单个输入中共同出现。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并被认为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来支持。

This project investigates how speakers of a language know the various forms a word can take. For many decades, linguists have established that speakers can learn and generalize over statistical trends in the language to create new forms of words that they have never previously encountered. On the other hand, in some cases speakers must memorize the behavior of individual forms that do not follow common patterns. This project explores the interplay between generalization and memorization by examining whether speakers take one form of a word into account when figuring out how to make another form. It aims to show that speakers can form these sorts of generalizations, thus improving our understanding of how speakers learn and maintain complicated systems in which a word can appear in many different forms.Each of the four languages studied in this project involves a case where two forms of a word show interpredictability: if a word takes suffix A in one context, it is also likely to take suffix B in a different context. These statistical tendencies will first be established by analyzing a dictionary or corpus of texts in the language. Next, a series of experiments will be run with speakers of the relevant language. In each experiment, speakers will be shown plausible but unattested words of their language with different suffixes in a number of contexts and asked to provide an additional suffixed form. The given forms will vary; the hypothesis is that speakers will similarly vary the suffixes they choose for the new forms, roughly mimicking the statistical tendencies of their language. To account for these correlations, this project develops a theoretical approach in which the forms of a word are associated with markers on that word's mental entry, and speakers learn generalizations over which sets of markers tend to cooccur within a single entry.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.