Doctoral Dissertation Research: Morphological Dependencies

该项目研究了一种语言的使用者如何知道一个单词可以采取的各种形式。几十年来，语言学家已经确定，说话者可以学习并概括语言的统计趋势，从而创造出他们以前从未遇到过的新词形式。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体形式的行为。该项目通过检查说话者在考虑如何形成另一种形式时是否考虑单词的一种形式，探索概括和记忆之间的相互作用。它的目的是表明说话者可以形成此类概括，从而提高我们对说话者如何学习和维护复杂系统的理解，在该系统中，一个单词可以以多种不同的形式出现。该项目研究的四种语言中的每一种都涉及一个单词的两种形式显示出可相互预测性的情况：如果一个单词在一个上下文中采用后缀 A，那么它也可能在不同的上下文中采用后缀 B。这些统计趋势将首先通过分析该语言的词典或文本语料库来建立。接下来，将针对相关语言的使用者进行一系列实验。在每个实验中，都会向说话者展示其语言中看似合理但未经证实的单词，并在多种上下文中使用不同的后缀，并要求其提供额外的后缀形式。给定的形式会有所不同；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，其中单词的形式与该单词的心理条目上的标记相关联，并且演讲者了解哪些标记组倾向于在单个条目中同时出现的概括。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。

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.