Executive control in sentence production

在日常语言使用中，说话者能够毫不费力地造句，将多个单词编织在一起，同时遵循复杂的语法规则。造句子的容易程度导致了一种猜测，即造句子可能不依赖于抑制控制等执行功能。该项目旨在通过关注主谓一致“吸引”错误来测试抑制控制是否在语法生成中起作用。在英语中，句子的主语与动词的数词一致（例如，“狮子是红色的”，“狮子是红色的”）。当句子中包含的第二个名词与主名词的语法数字不同时，就会出现吸引错误，比如“鸟旁边的狮子是红色的”。理解抑制控制在句子生成中的作用可以为如何评估和治疗语言障碍以及如何为产生非成人语法结构的儿童开发更有效的教学方法提供关键见解。拟议的研究为医学和认知科学研究的本科生和研究生提供了机会，这项研究的成果将通过社区外展计划和失语症康复项目传播给更广泛的公众。本项目使用两种方法来研究主谓一致错误是否独立于执行（抑制）控制。第一种方法结合实验技术，利用先进的统计模型来控制抑制需求，以测试不同类型的抑制控制对防止吸引力错误的贡献。其次，将实验扩展到6 ~ 8岁儿童，探讨执行控制能力的发展与协议生成能力的发展轨迹是否一致。

In everyday language use, speakers are able to produce sentences effortlessly, weaving together multiple words while following complex grammatical rules. The ease with which sentences are produced has led to speculations that sentence production may not rely on executive functions such as inhibitory control. This project aims to test whether inhibitory control plays a role in grammatical production by focusing on subject-verb agreement 'attraction' errors. In English, the subject of the sentence agrees with the verb in number (e.g., "The lion is red," "The lions are red"). Attraction errors arise when the sentence contains a second noun with a different grammatical number than the subject noun, as in "The lion next to the birds ARE red." Understanding the role of inhibitory control in sentence production could provide key insights on how to evaluate and treat language impairments, as well as how to develop more effective pedagogical methods for children who produce non-adult-like syntactic structures. The proposed research provides opportunities to bring together undergraduate and graduate students in medical and cognitive science research, and the outcome of this research will be disseminated to the broader public through community outreach programs and aphasia rehabilitation projects. This project uses two approaches to investigate whether subject-verb agreement errors are independent of executive (inhibitory) control. The first approach uses a combination of experimental techniques that manipulate inhibitory demand with advanced statistical modeling to test the contribution of different types of inhibitory control to the prevention of attraction errors. Second, the experiments are extended to 6- to 8-year-old children to investigate how the development of executive control abilities aligns with the developmental trajectory of agreement production abilities.