The Development and Redevelopment of Lexical and Sublexical Representations

语言是人类最基本的认知能力之一。它在正常的 开发，是许多领域获取信息的主要手段。一些心理 疾病（例如，精神分裂症，自闭症）可以破坏这个系统的正常功能， 加剧了这些疾病的负面后果。 心理语言学家已经在详细说明语言的结构和过程方面取得了重大进展， 语言理解在过去的二十年里，我们的实验室学到了很多东西， 关于单词是如何在一个人的“心理词典”中被表示的。我们的研究已经开始阐明 一个口语单词的呈现会导致一个特定的词汇表征被激活， 这种激活的效果是（例如，一个积极的词汇表征对其他词汇表征以及 其他级别的代表）。 目前的建议继续我们的调查口语处理，重点是 词汇和亚词汇系统的动态特性：通过知觉学习， 用于访问词条的子词汇表示的再开发。拟议 该项目包括大量的理论驱动的亚词汇感知学习的实证研究。的 实验使用一系列不同的方法，以确保正确的理论推论， 融合业务。关于知觉学习的一系列研究将提供一个详细的理解， 知觉系统重构其次词汇表征。我们迄今在这方面的工作表明， 系统对这种重构是适当保守的，只改变表示， 适应语音变化时，变化是说话者的特点（保守 调整/重组原则，或“CA/RP”）。拟议的实验将跟踪代表性的 在时间上、在暴露于变体的次数上、以及在变体的语音细节上移动。 拟议的研究的结果将是更好地了解 完成语言理解的系统。这些研究将提供一个更详细的画面 词汇和次词汇表征在短期和长期内的变化。这样的 理解对我们理解语言处理至关重要。因为语言是一种 认知能力，描述语言处理的进展将增强我们对人类认知能力的理解。 认知，在正常和混乱的条件下。

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, autism) can disrupt the normally impressive functioning of this system, greatly exacerbating the negative consequences of these disorders. Psycholinguists have made significant progress in specifying the structures and processes that underlie language comprehension. Over the course of the last two decades, our laboratory has learned a great deal about how words are represented in a person’s “mental lexicon”. Our research has begun to clarify how the presentation of a spoken word leads to a particular lexical representation becoming activated, and what the effects of such activation are (e.g., what effect one active lexical representation has on others, and on units at other levels of representation). The current proposal continues our investigation of spoken language processing, with a focus on the dynamic properties of lexical and sublexical systems: Through perceptual learning, there is continuous redevelopment of the sublexical representations that are used to access the lexical entries. The proposed project includes a large set of theoretically-driven empirical studies of sublexical perceptual learning. The experiments use a range of different methodologies, in order to assure correct theoretical inferences through converging operations. The set of studies on perceptual learning will provide a detailed understanding of how the perceptual system restructures its sublexical representations. Our work to date in this area has shown that the system is appropriately conservative about such restructuring, only changing the representations to accommodate phonetic variation when the variation is characteristic of a speaker (the Conservative Adjustment/Restructuring Principle, or “CA/RP”). The proposed experiments will track the representational shift, across time, across number of exposures to a variant, and across the phonetic details of the variants. 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 lexical and sublexical representations change over both the short term, and the longer term. Such an understanding is critical to our understanding language processing. 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.