Presuppositions in Online Language Comprehension

在解释语言话语时，人类的思维必须将许多不同类型的信息拼凑在一起。虽然这是潜意识的，但语言研究者已经发展了关于意义的不同方面如何被纳入整体解释的理论观点。然而，很少有人知道这些理论结构如何与实时发生的实际认知过程相关。本项目将有助于填补这一空白，通过调查的意义方面，特别是预设，从心理学的实验工具，从而加深我们对人类互动的一个基本方面的理解。这对于全面了解说话者如何通过语言与世界联系至关重要，也关系到社会中更广泛的问题。例如，对记忆心理学的研究表明，信息的预设状态对记忆的准确性有很大的影响，这与目击证人的证词和其他相关活动高度相关。在美国国家科学基金会的支持下，施瓦茨博士将研究预设如何与意义的其他方面，如断言的内容和某些语用推理（特别是含义），使用各种实验方法。预设是相对于话语所断言的主要观点的背景，并且（通常）已经在话语中建立。例如，“John left again”中的“again”表示已经知道John以前离开过，主要新闻是他第二次离开。该项目将调查这两个方面的意义在网上处理的相对时间进程：是否先得到评估的前提，这表明它的作用，整体幸福的话语需要在一开始就得到确认？或者，它是否扮演了一个附加推理的角色，只是在以后才被考虑？预设的另一个关键特征是它们与否定等算子的关系：“John hasn 't left again”仍然传达了他之前离开过（同时否认第二次离开）。本计画将探讨预设表达的嵌入式出现是否会引入额外的认知需求。最后，该项目还将研究这些句子的替代解释的可用性和潜在的认知成本，如“约翰（当然）没有再次离开-他从来没有离开摆在首位！“本项目是第一次全面尝试使用实验心理语言学的工具来研究涉及预设理解的认知过程。使用眼动仪，施瓦茨博士将记录人们在听到包含预设表达的语言刺激时相对于视觉场景的眼球运动。这允许以毫秒精度实时洞察整体意义的各个方面的展开。反应时间和其他行为测量进一步帮助理解说话者的口译过程和偏好。通过将理论工作与语言哲学和形式语义学的基础与心理语言学的实验方法相结合，这个跨学科项目将有助于将自然语言中的意义研究更深入地融入认知科学，并推进我们对人类思维的理论和经验的理解。

In interpreting linguistic utterances, the human mind has to piece together many different types of information. While this takes place sub-consciously, language researchers have developed theoretical perspectives on how distinct aspects of meaning are factored into the overall interpretation. However, little remains known about how these theoretical constructs relate to actual cognitive processes taking place in real-time. The present project will help to fill this gap by investigating aspects of meaning, specifically presuppositions, with experimental tools from psychology, and thereby deepen our understanding of a fundamental aspect of human interaction. This is essential for a comprehensive perspective on how speakers relate to the world through language, and also bears on broader issues in society. For example, research on the psychology of memory has shown that the presuppositional status of information has strong effects on memory accuracy, which is highly relevant in eye witness testimony and other related activities. With the support of the National Science Foundation, Dr. Schwarz will study how presuppositions relate to other aspects of meaning, such as asserted content and certain pragmatic inferences (specifically implicatures), using a variety of experimental methods. Presuppositions are backgrounded relative to the main point asserted by an utterance, and (typically) already count as established in the discourse. For example, 'again' in 'John left again' suggests that it was already known that John had left previously, the main news being his second departure. The project will investigate the relative time-course of these two aspects of meaning in online processing: Does the presupposition get evaluated first, suggesting that its role for the overall felicity of an utterance needs to be confirmed at the outset? Or does it play the role of an additional inference that is only considered later? Another crucial feature of presuppositions concerns their relation to operators like negation: 'John hasn't left again' still conveys that he left before (while denying a second departure). The project will investigate whether such embedded occurrences of presuppositional expressions introduce additional cognitive demands. Finally, the project will also study the availability and potential cognitive cost of an alternative interpretation of such sentences, as in 'John (certainly) hasn't left again--he never left in the first place!' The present project constitutes the first comprehensive attempt to use tools from experimental psycho-linguistics to study the cognitive processes involved in presupposition comprehension. Using an eye tracker, Dr. Schwarz will record people's eye movements relative to a visual scene while they're hearing linguistic stimuli that contain presuppositional expressions. This allows for real-time insights into the unfolding of individual aspects of the overall meaning with millisecond-accuracy. Response times and other behavioral measures further help to understand speakers' interpretation processes and preferences. By combining theoretical work with foundations in philosophy of language and formal semantics with experimental methods from psycho-linguistics, this interdisciplinary project will help to integrate the study of meaning in natural language more deeply into the cognitive sciences and advance our theoretical and empirical understanding of the human mind's remarkable capacities at work in linguistic communication.