Collaborative Research: Studying Language Production in the Field: Accessibility Effects on Variation

该奖项是根据2009年美国复苏和再投资法案（公法111-5）资助的。当说话者将他们的想法编码成语言话语时，他们通常可以选择几种不同的方式来传达同一信息。例如，说英语的人可能会使用主动语态或被动语态。如果病人是人类，而不是施暴者，他们更有可能选择被动而不是主动，因此更容易接近（“这个女孩被闪电击中了”）。这种可及性效应在一小部分（大部分是相关的）语言中得到了证实，并对语言学和心理语言学理论产生了巨大的影响。然而，先前的心理语言学研究语言不适合区分可及性效应的竞争账户。例如，根据可用性描述，说话者更喜欢在句子的前面提到更容易接近的指称物。另一方面，根据某些对齐的说法，说话者更喜欢把最容易理解的指称物作为句子的主语。这两种说法都正确地预测了英语被动选择和主动选择。为了解决这些问题，本研究将着眼于一种与英语在类型学上非常不同的语言的形态句法变化：尤卡泰（玛雅语）。这些研究将利用尤卡坦克语的特性来区分以前研究的语言无法做到的无障碍帐户。这些研究也将有助于建立一个基于实地的心理语言学跨学科研究计划。由于世界上大多数语言都是在远离心理语言学实验室的地方使用的，因此将心理语言学方法应用于野外条件下的变异研究是至关重要的，在野外条件下，招募参与者是一个非常重要的问题，并且不能假设对“实验”的概念非常熟悉。该研究将采用两种类型的制作方法，回忆研究和视频描述任务，以及语法评级。生产研究是心理语言学家研究语言生产选择的主要方法，为说话者生产的内容提供定量数据。语法性评级是理论语言学家在实地工作中使用的主要方法。这种方法将扩展到定量水平，使研究交替中的梯度偏好成为可能。通过使用这两种方法，结果的相关性和可及性将增加两个研究界。除了与心理语言学研究相关外，这些研究还将填补尤卡泰克语语法科学记录的重大空白，因为目前几乎没有句法变化的定量记录。这些数据将有助于区分不同的尤卡坦句法分析，并有助于句法类型学。这项研究的成功完成将对几个学科产生潜在的变革性影响：对于心理语言学来说，它将允许生产理论在更广泛的语言数据集上得到检验。对于现场语言学来说，它将有助于为未来的现场工作提供方法库，推动语言描述的最新技术。博士后研究员、研究生研究助理和本科生将有参与并成为基于实地的心理语言学新研究范式的专家的经验。他们将接受心理语言学理论、心理语言学和实地工作方法（包括最先进的统计数据分析）方面的培训。母语顾问是土著社区的成员，他们将接受宝贵的语言训练。该研究的声音文件将构成玛雅语句法变化的第一个大规模文件。所有数据都将存档并免费提供，以便对材料进行进一步研究。为方便对其他未充分研究的语言进行类似的调查，还将提供所有实验刺激物和脚本。

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).When speakers encode their thoughts into linguistic utterances, they often can choose between several different ways of conveying the same message. For example, English speakers may use an active or a passive. They are more likely to choose a passive over an active if the patient, but not the agent, is human and hence more accessible ("The girl was struck by lightning"). Such accessibility effects are well-established for a small set of (mostly related) languages, and have had a tremendous influence on linguistic and psycholinguistic theory. Yet, the languages previously studied psycholinguistically are unsuited for distinguishing competing accounts of accessibility effects. For example, according to availability accounts, speakers prefer to mention the more accessible referent earlier in the sentence. According to certain alignment accounts, on the other hand, speakers prefer to make the most accessible referent the subject of the sentence. Both accounts correctly predict English passive vs. active choice. To address these questions, this study will look at morphosyntactic variations in a language that is typologically very different from English: Yucatec (Mayan). The studies will exploit properties of Yucatec to distinguish between accessibility accounts where previously studied languages fail to do so. The studies will also contribute to the establishment of an interdisciplinary research program of field-based psycholinguistics. Since most of the world's languages are spoken far away from psycholinguistic laboratories, it is crucial to adapt and apply psycholinguistic methods to the study of variation under field conditions, where participant recruiting is a non-trivial issue and familiarity with the very concept of an "experiment" cannot be assumed. The research will employ two types of production methodologies, recall studies and video description tasks, as well as grammaticality ratings. Production studies are the primary methodology of psycholinguists working on choice in language production, providing quantitative data on what speakers produce. Grammaticality ratings are the primary methodology of theoretical linguists employed in fieldwork. This method will be extended to a quantitative level, making it possible to study gradient preferences in alternations. By using both methods, the relevance and accessibility of the results will be increased for both research communities. In addition to their relevance for psycholinguistic research, the studies will close significant gaps in the scientific record of the grammar of Yucatec, for which close to no quantitative record of syntactic variation exists. This data will help to distinguish between competing analyses of Yucatec syntax, and will contribute to syntactic typology.The successful completion of the research will have a potentially transformative effect on several disciplines: for psycholinguistics, it will allow theories of production to be tested against a wider set of language data. For field linguistics, it will contribute to the methodological repertoire available for future field work, pushing forward the state-of-the-art in language description. The post-doctoral researcher, graduate research assistants, and undergraduate students will have the experience of participating in and becoming specialists in a newly emerging research paradigm of field-based psycholinguistics. They will be trained in psycholinguistic theory, as well as psycholinguistic and field work methodologies (including state-of-the-art statistical data analysis). The native speaker consultants, who are members of indigenous communities, will receive valuable linguistic training. The sound files from the research will constitute the first large scale documentation of syntactic variation in Mayan. All data will be archived and made freely available, allowing further study of the material. To facilitate similar investigation on other understudied languages, all experimental stimuli and scripts will also be made available.