Causes and Consequences of Lexical Activation

词汇激活的原因和后果

• 批准号: 6897166
• 负责人: ARTHUR G SAMUEL
• 金额: $ 20.71万
• 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 2009-05-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/6897166
• 关键词: auditory feedback; behavioral /social science research tag; brain electrical activity; clinical research; cognition; comprehension; cues; human subject; neural information processing; phonology; psycholinguistics; speech recognition; syntax; vocabulary; voice

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Understanding language is one of the most fundamental human cognitive abilities. It plays an important role in normal development, and is the major means for acquiring information in many domains. A number of psychological disorders (e.g., schizophrenia) can disrupt the normally impressive functioning of this system, greatly exacerbating the negative consequences of these disorders. Psycholinguists have made significant progress in clarifying the structures and processes that underlie language comprehension. Despite this progress, much remains to be learned about how words are represented in a person's "mental lexicon". Critical remaining issues in this area revolve around questions of lexical representation, and lexical access. Theories must 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 empirical investigations are organized into three interlocking groups of experiments. One set of studies examines how phonetic variation can affect lexical access, and can even change the lexical representations themselves. Such variation can have surprisingly powerful effects on how words are represented in the lexicon. A second set of studies examines even more fundamental changes in the lexicon: How do adults add new items to their mental lexicons, and what are the consequences of such changes? The third set of experiments investigates the dynamics of lexical competition: How does the activation of one lexical item affect the activation levels of other lexical entries? The product of the proposed research will be a much better understanding of the architecture of the system that accomplishes language comprehension. These studies will provide a much more detailed picture of how the mental lexicon changes over both the short term, and the longer term. 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, under both normal and disordered conditions.

描述（由申请人提供）：理解语言是人类最基本的认知能力之一。它在正常的发展中起着重要的作用，是许多领域获取信息的主要手段。一些心理障碍（例如，精神分裂症）可以破坏该系统的正常功能，大大加剧这些疾病的负面后果。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。尽管取得了这些进展，但关于单词在一个人的“心理词典”中是如何表现的，还有很多东西有待了解。在这一领域的关键剩余问题围绕着词汇表征和词汇访问的问题。理论必须明确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，以及这种激活的效果是什么：一个活跃的词汇表征对其他的词汇表征有什么影响，以及对其他表征水平的单位有什么影响？ 当前的提案包括大量理论驱动的词汇激活实证研究。实证研究分为三个相互关联的实验组。一组研究考察语音变异如何影响词汇通达，甚至改变词汇表征本身。这样的变化会对词汇在词典中的表现产生令人惊讶的强大影响。第二组研究考察了词汇中更根本的变化：成年人如何在他们的心理词汇中添加新的项目，以及这些变化的后果是什么？第三组实验考察词汇竞争的动态：一个词项的激活如何影响其他词项的激活水平？ 拟议研究的成果将是更好地了解实现语言理解的系统架构。这些研究将为心理词汇在短期和长期内的变化提供更详细的描述。这种理解对于我们理解语言处理至关重要。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，无论是在正常还是无序的条件下。