CAUSES AND CONSEQUENCES OF LEXICAL ACTIVATION

词汇激活的原因和后果

• 批准号: 6499247
• 负责人: ARTHUR G SAMUEL
• 金额: $ 16.45万
• 依托单位: STATE UNIVERSITY NEW YORK STONY BROOK
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 财政年份: 1994
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 1994-09-30 至 2004-01-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/6499247
• 关键词: auditory feedback; behavioral /social science research tag; clinical research; cognition; comprehension; cues; human subject; neural information processing; psycholinguistics; psychomotor reaction time; sound frequency; speech recognition; syntax

Understanding language is one of the most fundamental human cognitive abilities. It plays an important role in normal development, and is a major means for acquiring information in many domains. Psycholinguists have made significant progress in clarifying the structures and processes that underlie language comprehension. In recent years, it has become clear that a central issue in this area is lexical access. Theories most specify how the presentation of a spoken word leads to a particular lexical representation becoming activated, and what the effects of such activation are: What effect does one active lexical representation have on others, and on units at other levels of representation? The current proposal includes a large set of theoretically-driven empirical studies of lexical activation. The experiments use a range of different methodologies, in order to assure correct theoretical inferences through converging operations. Several of the experiments investigate structural issues: What is the nature of the connections between lexical entries? What types of input and output codes are involved in accessing lexical representations? Are the same unit types (e.g., phonemes, demisyllables, and syllables) used by both input (perception) and output (production) processes? Other experiments explore aspects of lexical processing: Is lexical access a purely bottom-up, autonomous process, or is the architecture interactive, with top- down information flow? Does processing proceed in a strictly "left-to-right" fashion, or does the system instead use some forms of asynchronous processing? More generally, what is the time course of lexical processing? The product of the proposed research will be a much better understanding of the architecture of the system that accomplishes language comprehension. Such an understanding is critical to our understanding language processing. In turn, because language is such a fundamental cognitive ability, progress in describing language processing will enhance our understanding of human cognition.

理解语言是人类最基本的认知能力之一。它在人的正常发育中起着重要的作用，是许多领域获取信息的主要手段。心理语言学家在阐明语言理解的结构和过程方面取得了重大进展。近年来，这一领域的一个核心问题是词汇获取。理论大多详细说明了一个口语单词的呈现是如何导致一个特定的词汇表征被激活的，以及这种激活的影响是什么：一个活跃的词汇表征对其他的词汇表征有什么影响，对其他层次表征的单位有什么影响？目前的建议包括大量的理论驱动的词汇激活的实证研究。实验使用了一系列不同的方法，以便通过收敛操作确保正确的理论推断。其中几个实验研究了结构问题：词汇条目之间的联系的本质是什么？在访问词法表示时涉及哪些类型的输入和输出代码？输入（感知）和输出（生产）过程是否使用相同的单位类型（例如，音素、半音节和音节）？其他的实验探索了词汇处理的各个方面：词汇访问是一个纯粹的自下而上的自治过程，还是这个体系结构是与自上而下的信息流交互的？处理是否严格按照“从左到右”的方式进行，或者系统是否使用某种形式的异步处理？更一般地说，词汇加工的时间过程是怎样的？所提出的研究成果将是对完成语言理解的系统架构的更好理解。这种理解对于我们理解语言处理是至关重要的。反过来，由于语言是一种基本的认知能力，描述语言处理的进展将增强我们对人类认知的理解。