Language Comprehension

描述（由申请人提供）：拟议的研究探讨英语读者和听众如何使用他们的语言的语义结构的知识来理解句子和话语。它建立在早期的研究，研究他们如何使用句法结构，将其扩展到语义学领域已经研究过的主题。特别是，该研究调查了人们如何能够理解具有变量的句子，这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”变量绑定（“每个男人都爱他的妻子”vs.“男人们给他们的妻子买了礼物”; B）对“世界变量”的处理，本质上意味着某些事态在现实世界中是不真实的;以及c）确定量化变量的范围（例如，“办公室大多数是干净的”是指大多数办公室还是指清洁程度？）。这些主题中的每一个都是形式语义学领域内深入分析的主题，并为实验心理语言学研究做好了准备。所提出的实验研究这些主题与各种技术，从简单的任务判断的意义或自然的句子和话语的措施，在正常的阅读的眼动。公共卫生相关性：本研究的直接目标是探讨正常成人读者和听者如何从句子的各个部分的意义中构建出句子的意义。这是一种在完整的人类中普遍存在的技能，但在语言障碍的情况下，尤其是失语症，这种技能可能会退化或丧失。更好地理解失语症必须基于更好地理解失语症中丢失的特定语言功能，并且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，中风导致语言障碍的预期发病率增加。

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.