Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Time Course of Givenness Effects in Language Production Models

有效的口语需要连续流畅、高效地说出多个单词。我们在做这件事时的相对轻松掩盖了它的复杂性。当我们计划说什么时，我们会选择单词，为这些单词选择合适的发音，并确保每个单词都得到足够的关注，以便快速准确地说出来。了解这些单独的过程，以及人们如何产生语言，需要了解每个单词的时间。这个项目探讨了语言产生的基本过程之间的关系，比如选择一个单词和它的发音，以及这个单词和周围单词的持续时间。这些实验验证了一个假设，即选择单词或选择发音的过程会影响单词的持续时间。此外，他们还测试了这种效应是否会延伸到辅助单词周围的每个单词。该方法修改了一个已建立的范式，即图片-文字干扰（PWI）任务，以研究语义和语音加工的时间和参与。参与者在忽略语音干扰的情况下说出一张图片的名字。当干扰物与意义或声音密切相关时，它们会影响加工过程，因此实验控制了这些关系。它还控制着图片和干扰物出现的相对时间，这也影响着处理过程。这种对时间和相关性的严格控制允许对语言产生的子过程如何影响单个单词的持续时间进行仔细的调查。它还将显示与意义无关的加工的便捷性如何影响周围单词的持续时间。理解持续时间背后的过程对于理解语音生成至关重要，因为句子中每个单词的持续时间不仅反映了它自己的处理过程，还反映了生成系统如何同时管理多个单词。这个项目将为理解加工和持续时间之间的关系迈出第一步。它还将支持一位有前途的学者的科学培训。

Speaking effectively requires producing multiple words in a row, smoothly and efficiently. The relative ease we experience while doing this belies its complexity. When planning what to say, we engage in processes like selecting words, choosing appropriate sounds for those words, and ensuring that each word receives enough attention to get produced quickly and accurately. Understanding these individual processes, and thus how people produce language, requires understanding the timing of each word. This project explores the relationship between basic processes in language production, such as choosing a word and its sounds, and the duration of that and surrounding words. The experiments test the hypothesis that facilitating the process of selecting a word or selecting its sounds influences that word's duration. Further, they test whether this effect extends to each of the words surrounding the facilitated word. The method modifies an established paradigm, the Picture-Word Interference (PWI) task, to investigate the timing and involvement of semantic and phonological processing. Participants name a picture while ignoring a spoken distractor. Distractors influence processing when they relate closely in meaning or sound, so the experiment controls these relationships. It also controls the relative timing of the appearance of the pictures and distracters, which influences processing as well. This tight control over timing and relatedness allows for a close investigation of how sub-processes of language production contribute to the duration of individual words. It will also show how facilitation of meaning-irrelevant processing affects the duration of surrounding words. Understanding the processes that underlie duration is fundamentally important for understanding speech production, because the duration of each word in a sentence reflects not only its own processing, but also how the production system manages multiple words simultaneously. This project will take the first steps toward understanding the relationship between processing and duration. It will also support the scientific training of a promising scholar.