Syntactic Priming in Comprehension

在美国国家科学基金会的支持下，马修·j·特拉克斯勒博士将进行为期三年的语言学研究，研究读者在理解句子时如何获取和使用存储的语法知识。该项目将使用高精度的眼动仪来监测读者在处理各种语法类型的句子时的眼球运动。实验将评估对一个句子的处理在多大程度上促进了对具有相似句法结构或重叠词汇（词相关）信息的句子的处理。由于眼球运动对加工需求的微小变化非常敏感，因此读者的眼球运动模式将表明阅读一个句子是否会加快后续句子的加工。本研究的目的是：(a)确定为一个句子建立一个“上下文无关”的句法结构是否可以加快对下一个句子的处理，(b)确定与两个连续句子中出现的特定单词相关的论点结构信息是否提供了加快对第二个句子处理的唯一手段。(c)确定便利加工是否发生在一系列句子类型中，还是仅限于那些通常会造成重大加工困难的句子。这项研究的结果对于理解语法知识是如何存储和用于确定句子中单词如何相互关联将是重要的。此外，研究结果将为读者在多大程度上通过使用自主解析模块来发现句子的句法结构，而不是访问和应用广泛的概率线索（包括词汇存储频率）的讨论提供信息。一个完整的规范语言处理模型，特别是那些用于解析句子的过程，可能对研究失语症人群的从业者和开发基于计算机的语言理解系统的计算机科学家有用。

0446618 TraxlerWith National Science Foundation support, Dr. Matthew J. Traxler will conduct three years of linguistic research examining how readers access and use stored grammatical knowledge while comprehending sentences. The project will use a highly accurate eye-tracker to monitor readers' eye movements as they process sentences of various grammatical types. The experiments will assess the degree to which processing of one sentence facilitates the processing of a following sentence with a similar syntactic structure or overlapping lexical (word-related) information. Because eye-movements are highly sensitive to small changes in processing demands, the readers' patterns of eye-movements will indicate whether reading one sentence speeds the processing of a subsequent sentence. The goals of this research are to (a) determine whether building a "context-free" syntactic structure for one sentence can speed processing of a following sentence, (b) determine whether argument-structure information that is tied to specific words that appear in two consecutive sentences provides the only means to speed processing of the second sentence, and (c) to determine whether facilitated processing occurs across a range of sentence types or is limited to only those sentences that normally cause substantial processing difficulty. The results of this research will be important for understanding how grammatical knowledge is stored and used to determine how words in sentences are related to one another. Further, the results will inform ongoing discussion of the extent to which readers discover the syntactic structure of a sentence by using an autonomous parsing module versus accessing and applying a wide range of probabilistic cues, including lexically stored frequencies. A fully articulated model of normative language processing, particularly those processes used to parse sentences, may be useful to practitioners working with aphasic populations and computer scientists developing computer-based language understanding systems.