On-Line Reference Comprehension and Production

在线参考理解和制作

• 批准号: 6685396
• 负责人: JENNIFER E ARNOLD
• 金额: $ 7.21万
• 依托单位: UNIVERSITY OF ROCHESTER
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 财政年份: 2003
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2003-07-01 至 2004-06-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/6685396
• 关键词: adult human (21+); auditory stimulus; behavior test; behavioral /social science research tag; clinical research; comprehension; cues; expectancy; eye movements; human subject; language; language development; middle childhood (6-11); neural information processing; preschool child (1-5); psycholinguistics; semantics; speech; stimulus /response; syntax; visual stimulus; visual tracking

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This research program aims to understand the mechanisms and representations underlying the production and comprehension of referring expressions, with a focus on how comprehenders assess the accessibility of discourse entities and integrate this with lexical information as it unfolds over time. The experiments with adults examine a set of factors not previously identified with accessibility, including features of naturally-occurring language that are often not studied experimentally, like disfluency. These and other proposed experiments explore the role of expectancy in referent accessibility, as opposed to a traditional focus on how an entity has been treated in the history of the discourse. They take a multi-faceted approach, exploring how accessibility, expectancy and anaphoric form influence the processes of choosing and understanding referring expressions, and how this affects parsing decisions. The experiments with children ask basic questions about how they assess referent accessibility during on-line processing. Comprehension experiments with both adults and children will monitor participants' eye movements while they follow instructions to move objects on a display or listen to a narrative about a picture. Eye movements provide a fine-grained picture of the hypotheses that comprehenders make during on-line reference processing. The research with adults will also draw explicit links between language comprehension and production, by investigating the types of entities that get referred to frequently (and therefore may have a relatively high expectancy), and the referential forms that speakers choose under conditions of high and low expectancy. The proposed research will provide a systematic investigation of factors that affect referent accessibility, and how they affect reference comprehension and production. The study of reference comprehension and production is critical for understanding natural language use, which could not take place if comprehenders were not able to match the speaker's referring expressions with entities and concepts in the real world. The study of reference processing also bears directly on understanding other aspects of language processing, like syntactic ambiguity resolution and lexical access, which have recently been shown to be sensitive to the referential context. The development of explicit models of reference and other aspects of language processing is necessary for the diagnosis and treatment of language disorders, such as aphasia.

描述（由申请人提供）：本研究项目旨在了解指称表达的产生和理解的机制和表征，重点是话语表达者如何评估话语实体的可及性，并将其与词汇信息结合起来，因为它随着时间的推移而展开。针对成年人的实验检查了一系列之前未被确定为可及性的因素，包括通常未通过实验研究的自然语言的特征，例如不流利。这些和其他拟议的实验探讨的作用，预期在指称的可及性，而不是一个传统的重点是如何处理一个实体在历史上的话语。他们采取了多方面的方法，探索可及性，预期和照应形式如何影响选择和理解指涉表达的过程，以及这如何影响分析决策。儿童的实验问一些基本的问题，他们如何评估在网上处理的指称可及性。成人和儿童的理解实验将监测参与者的眼球运动，同时他们按照指示移动显示器上的物体或听关于图片的叙述。眼球运动提供了一个细粒度的图片的假设，在网上参考处理。对成年人的研究还将通过调查经常被提及的实体类型（因此可能具有相对较高的期望）以及说话者在高期望和低期望条件下选择的指称形式，来明确语言理解和产出之间的联系。本研究将系统地探讨影响指称可及性的因素，以及这些因素如何影响指称的理解和产生。指称理解和产生的研究对于理解自然语言的使用至关重要，如果指称者不能将说话者的指称表达与真实的世界中的实体和概念相匹配，自然语言的使用就不可能发生。指称加工的研究也直接关系到理解语言加工的其他方面，如句法歧义消解和词汇通达，这些方面最近被证明对指称语境很敏感。语言处理的参考和其他方面的显式模型的发展是必要的语言障碍，如失语症的诊断和治疗。