On-Line Reference Comprehension and Production

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背后的机制和表征，重点关注理解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。针对成年人的实验研究了一系列之前未被确定为可访问性的因素，包括自然产生的语言的特征，这些特征通常没有被实验研究过，比如不流利。这些和其他提出的实验探索了期望在指称可及性中的作用，而不是传统的关注一个实体在话语历史中是如何被对待的。他们采用多方面的方法，探索可及性、期望和回指形式如何影响选择和理解指代表达的过程，以及这如何影响解析决策。对儿童进行的实验询问了他们在在线处理过程中如何评估参考可及性的基本问题。在成人和儿童的理解实验中，当他们按照指示移动显示器上的物体或听关于图片的叙述时，将监测参与者的眼球运动。眼球运动为理解者在在线参考处理过程中所做的假设提供了一幅精细的画面。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引用形式，得出语言理解和生产之间的明确联系。本研究将系统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是至关重要的，如果理解者不能将说话者的指称表达与现实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，如句法歧义解决和词汇获取，这些方面最近被证明对指称上下文很敏感。明确的参考模型和语言处理的其他方面的发展是必要的语言障碍的诊断和治疗，如失语症。

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.