POWRE: Prosodic Influences on the Production and Comprehension of Syntactic Ambiguity in a Game-Based Conversation Task

这项研究旨在证明，天真的说话者在自然的对话情境中可靠地使用韵律（不严格地说，是“演讲中的旋律”）来组织他们提供给听众的信息，而听众反过来又利用这种韵律结构来促进准确地恢复说话者的意图。本研究的主要目的是建立一种句子理解的心理语言学模型，其中韵律起着基本的作用，通常决定着句子的句法和语义解释。在这些实验中，参与者将玩一个合作棋盘游戏，引发半自发产生的句法歧义句子。该游戏涉及两个说话者，每个人都有一个对方看不到的棋盘，他们必须使用一组有限的脚本句子来确定和交流共同的动作。关键话语包含句法歧义，例如“移动三角形的正方形”中模棱两可的介词短语附件（意思是“用三角形推正方形”或“移动房子形状的块”）。为了评估韵律的产生，玩家的语音将被数字化记录并提交给语音和语音分析。为了评估韵律在理解中的运用，当玩家倾听和理解对话并执行游戏动作时，他们的眼球运动的时间和固定位置将被记录下来。实验将使用头戴式眼动追踪技术，这是一项相对较新的技术，最近在涉及听众视觉场景中物体的孤立口语句子的实验中，被证明对韵律和句法因素很敏感。该装置是理想的，因为它不限制运动，不引入额外的实验任务，不打断说话或倾听。这项研究有两个新颖的方面。首先，游戏任务将参与者的注意力集中在交流行为上，而不是在阅读过程上，可以更准确地描绘出天真的说话者之间自然对话中韵律的使用情况。最近关于语言产生的研究认为，说话者只有在意识到歧义并得到明确指示的情况下才会使用韵律来消除语法歧义，这意味着尽管听众可以使用韵律，但他们可能很少有机会这样做。然而，在这些研究中，说话者从笔记卡片上读句子。由于读者的语用目标与典型对话中说话人的语用目标有很大的不同，这些任务可能会歪曲韵律消歧的性质和程度。其次，游戏任务与头戴式眼球追踪技术的结合将开发出一种急需的新方法，该方法将提供一种即时精确的在线理解测量方法，当理解作为半自发的口语话语的一部分发生时，可以使用这种方法。这将使Speer能够研究韵律、句法和情境决定的话语变量对句子理解时间过程的相对影响，这是当前人类语言处理建模工作的核心。这项power拨款将允许Speer购买一个头戴式系统，为她提供利用这种目前无法使用的新方法的机会，并进行必要的探索性工作，以开始新的调查。这种方法的可用性将大大提高她在研究项目的最基本层面上提供与重要理论问题相关的实证数据的能力，因此对她的职业发展非常重要。

This research is designed to demonstrate that naive speakers in a natural conversational situation reliably use prosody (loosely, the 'melody in speech') to structure the information they provide to listeners, and that listeners in turn make use of this prosodic structure to facilitate accurate recovery of the speaker's intended meaning. The broad objective of the research is to develop a psycholinguistic model of sentence comprehension in which prosody plays a fundamental role, often determining the syntactic and semantic interpretation assigned to a sentence. Participants in these experiments will play a cooperative board game that elicits semi-spontaneous productions of syntactically ambiguous sentences. The game involves two speakers, each with a game board the other cannot see, who must use to a limited set of scripted sentences to determine and communicate joint moves. Key utterances contain syntactic ambiguities such as the ambiguous prepositional phrase attachment in "Move the square with the triangle," (meaning either 'push the square with the triangle' or 'move the house-shaped piece.') To evaluate the production of prosody, players' speech will be recorded digitally and submitted to phonetic and phonological analysis. To evaluate the use of prosody in comprehension, the timing and fixation locations of players eyemovements will be recorded as they listen to and comprehend the conversation and implement the game moves. The experiments will use head-mounted eye tracking, a relatively new technology recently shown to be sensitive to prosodic and syntactic factors in experiments with isolated spoken sentences that refer to objects in the listeners' visual scene. The apparatus is ideal because it does not restrict movement, does not introduce an additional experimental task, and does not interrupt speaking or listening. There are two novel aspects to this research. The first is that the game task focuses the participants' attention on the act of communication rather than on the process of reading, and can provide a more accurate picture of the use prosody in natural conversation between naive speakers. Recent work in language production has argued that speakers use prosody to disambiguate syntax only when they are aware of the ambiguity and are given explicit instructions, implying that although listeners can use prosody, they may have few opportunities to do so. However, speakers in these studies read sentences from notecards. Because the pragmatic goals of a reader differ dramatically from those of speakers in typical conversation, such tasks may misrepresent the nature and extent of prosodic disambiguation. The second is that the combination of the game task with head-mounted eyetracking technology will develop a much-needed novel method that will provide a temporally-precise, on-line measure of comprehension that can be used while comprehension is occurring as part of semi-spontaneous spoken discourse. This will allow Speer to investigate the issues concerning the relative influence of prosodic, syntactic, and situationally-determined discourse variables over the time course of sentence comprehension, which form the core of current work in modeling human language processing. This POWRE grant will allow Speer to purchase a head-mounted system, providing her the opportunity to utilize this new methodology to which she currently has no access, and to conduct exploratory work necessary to begin a new line of inquiry. The availability of such methodology will greatly enhance her ability to provide empirical data relevant to important theoretical questions at the most basic level of her research program and thus will be highly important to the advancement of her career.