Language Comprehension

描述（由申请人提供）：本研究旨在探讨英语读者和听者如何运用他们的语言语义结构知识来理解句子和语篇。它建立在早期研究他们如何使用句法结构的基础上，将其扩展到语义学领域的研究主题。特别是，该研究调查了人们如何能够理解带有变量的句子，这是人类语言表达能力的重要来源。它研究变量处理的三个不同方面：a) true vs. true。“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)“世界变量”的处理，本质上意味着在现实世界中某些事情的状态是不真实的；c)确定量化变量的范围（例如“the offices are most clean”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，并准备进行实验心理语言学研究。本文提出的实验采用多种技术来研究这些主题，从判断句子和话语的意义或自然程度的简单任务到正常阅读过程中眼球运动的测量。公共健康相关性：这项研究的直接目标是探索正常的成年读者和听众如何从句子各部分的意义中组成句子的意义。这一技能在完整的人类中是普遍存在的，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。更好地理解失语症必须建立在更好地理解失语症中失去的特定语言功能的基础上，希望这种更好的理解将导致更好的治疗——这是一个重要的目标，在老龄化人口中，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.