Structural Dependencies in Language Production

摘要本研究旨在阐明语言产生过程中长距离依赖的心理语言学过程。这种依赖关系构成了相当大的理论挑战，因为可靠地格式化不连续元素所需的抽象结构知识不能直接与增量、逐字生产的发音要求相匹配。要探讨的依赖关系首先是主语和动词之间的数的一致性，其次是主语和主语的比喻之间的数的一致性。由于英语中的动词一致性可能需要从非语言信息、词汇、词法和其他来源获取一系列关于数字的信息，因此它为研究语言产生过程中信息的传递和相互作用提供了许多机会。相反，由于它表现出严格的句法条件，它提供了观察信息传递和交互约束的机会。关于信息传递的本质和可能发生作用的约束类型的预测来自Garrett（1975,1988）开发的生产方法，并由其他人（Bock, 1987a; Lapointe, 1985; Lapointe & Dell, 1989; Levelt, 1989）加以阐述。本实验采用协议-错误引出任务与定时发音任务相结合的方法，探讨协议操作中使用的数字信息的性质、主体识别和维护操作的性质以及协议执行的处理需求。

ABSTRACT The research is designed to illuminate the psycholinguistic processes involved in implementing long-distance dependencies during language production. Such dependencies constitute a considerable theoretical challenge, since the abstract structural knowledge required to reliably format the discontinuous elements does not straightforwardly mesh with articulatory requirement of incremental, word-by-word production. The dependencies to be explored are, primarily, number agreement between subjects and verbs, and, secondarily, number agreement between subjects and subject anaphors. Because verb agreement in English may call on a range of information about number from the nonlinguistic message, from the lexicon, from the morphology, and from other sources, it offers many opportunities to examine the transmission and interaction of information during language production. Conversely, because it exhibits strict syntactic conditioning, it offers opportunities to observe constraints on the transmission and interaction of information. Predictions about the nature of information transmission and the types of constraints likely to operate are derived from an approach to production developed by Garrett (1975, 1988) and elaborated by others (Bock, 1987a; Lapointe, 1985; Lapointe & Dell, 1989; Levelt, 1989). The experiments employ agreement-error elicitation tasks in tandem with timed pronunciation tasks to explore the nature of the number information used in the agreement operation, the nature of subject identification and maintenance operations, and the processing demands of agreement implementation.