Language Comprehension

描述(由申请者提供)：这项拟议的研究考察了英语读者和听者如何利用他们对语言的语义结构的知识来理解句子和语篇。它建立在考察它们如何使用句法结构的早期研究的基础上，将其扩展到已在语义学领域进行研究的主题。特别是，这项研究调查了人们如何能够理解带有变量的句子，而变量是人类语言表达能力的重要来源。它研究了变量处理的三个不同方面：a)真与假的变量绑定(“每个男人都爱他的妻子”vs.“男人给妻子买礼物”；b)对“世界变量”的处理，本质上意味着某些情况在实际世界中并不真实；以及c)确定变量的量化范围(例如，“办公室基本干净”是指大多数办公室还是指干净程度？)。这些主题中的每一个都是形式语义学领域中深入分析的主题，并为实验性的心理语言学研究做好了准备。所提出的实验使用了各种技术来研究这些话题，从判断句子和语篇的意义或自然性的简单任务到正常阅读过程中眼动的测量。与公共健康相关：这项研究的直接目标是探索正常的成人读者和听众如何根据句子的各个部分的意义来构成句子的意义。这是一种在完好无损的人类中普遍存在的技能，但在语言障碍的情况下，这种技能可能会退化或丧失，最明显的是失语症。对失语症的更好理解必须建立在对失语症中丧失的特定语言功能的更好理解的基础上，希望这种更好的理解将导致更好的治疗-这是老龄化人口的一个重要目标，因为中风导致语言障碍的预期发生率越来越高。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The proposed research examines how English readers and listeners use their knowledge of the semantic structure of their language to comprehend sentences and discourse. It builds on earlier research examining how they use syntactic structure, extending it to topics that have been investigated in the field of semantics. In particular, the research investigates how people are able to comprehend sentences with variables, which are an essential source of the expressive power of human languages. It studies three distinct aspects of the processing of variables: a) true vs. 'fake' variable binding ("Every man loves his wife" vs. "The men bought presents for their wives;" b) the processing of `world variables,' essentially implicatures that some state of affairs is not true in the actual world; and c) the determination of the domain over which a variable is quantified (e.g. does "The offices are mostly clean" refer to most offices or to degrees of cleanliness?). Each of these topics is the subject of intensive analysis within the field of formal semantics and is ready for experimental psycholinguistic study. The experiments that are proposed study these topics with a variety of techniques, ranging from simple tasks of judging the meaning or the naturalness of sentences and discourses to measures of eye movements during normal reading. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: The immediate goal of the research is to explore how normal adult readers and listeners compose the meaning of a sentence out of the meaning of its parts. This is a skill that is universal among intact humans, but that can be degraded or lost in cases of language disorder, most notably aphasia. A better understanding of aphasia must be based on a better understanding of the specific linguistic functions that are lost in aphasia, and it is hoped that such a better understanding will lead to better treatment - an important goal in an aging population with an increasing expected incidence of strokes leading to language impairments.