Doctoral Dissertation Research: Morphosyntactic and Interpretive Dependency Formation in Agreement Attraction

对于典型的以英语为母语的成年人来说，理解句子感觉非常容易。事实上，我们从以往的研究中了解到，理解是一个高度复杂的心理过程，需要说话者在巨大的时间压力下，将关于其语言结构的复杂的内隐知识与适当的感知和记忆操作协调起来。虽然人类在这项具有挑战性的任务上非常熟练，但他们有时会得出与他们收到的语言输入不一致的错误解释。本研究旨在探讨记忆提取错误在多大程度上导致句子加工过程中的误解，有助于更好地理解语言理解困难人群所遇到的问题。语言理解经常需要在不相邻的单词之间建立词法和解释关系，这样就必须从记忆中提取较早的单词。例如，在句子‘美丽的树旁边的男孩可能听不到音乐’中，动词‘do’必须在数量上与主语中心语‘男孩’一致，尽管有很多词介于主语中心语和动词之间。记忆提取很容易受到基于相似性的干扰。因此，以前的研究表明，当非主语名词在数量上与动词匹配时，理解者不太可能注意到违反主谓一致的情况(例如，“柜子的钥匙生锈了”)，这可能是因为有时匹配数字的非主语名词是从记忆中错误提取的，而不是目标。在这里，研究人员将使用评估实时语言理解的方法，如跟踪阅读过程中的眼球运动，来调查主谓一致中的错误提取如何影响句子的解释。记忆提取的干扰被认为与非熟练读者的理解困难有关，并被认为是本族语者和第二语言学习者加工差异的主要来源。更好地理解记忆提取的基本特性如何导致误解，将有助于我们理解语言理解是如何影响这些不太成功的语言使用者的。

For typical adult native speakers, understanding sentences feels very easy. In fact, we know from prior research that comprehension is a highly complex mental process that requires speakers to coordinate sophisticated implicit knowledge about the structure of their language with the appropriate perceptual and memory operations under immense time pressure. While humans are remarkably skilled at this challenging task, they sometimes arrive at erroneous interpretations that are inconsistent with the linguistic input they received. Understanding the mechanisms that lead to misinterpretations in neurotypical adult native speakers is an important step towards a better understanding of the problems experienced by populations that have difficulties with language comprehension, such as second language learners or people with language disorders.This project investigates to what extent memory retrieval errors contribute to misinterpretation in sentence processing. Language comprehension frequently requires establishing morphosyntactic and interpretive relationships between non-adjacent words, such that the earlier word has to be retrieved from memory. For example, in the sentence 'The boy next to the beautiful trees probably does not hear the music', the verb 'does' has to agree in number with the subject head 'boy', even though many words intervene between the subject head and the verb. Memory retrieval is susceptible to similarity-based interference. Therefore, previous research has shown that comprehenders are less likely to notice subject-verb agreement violations in the presence of a non-subject noun that matches the verb in number (e.g., 'The key to the cabinets are rusty'), presumably because sometimes the number-matching non-subject noun is misretrieved from memory instead of the target. Here the researchers will use methods of evaluating real-time language comprehension such as tracking eye movements during reading to investigate how misretrieval in subject-verb agreement impacts the interpretation of the sentence. Interference in memory retrieval has been linked to comprehension difficulties in unskilled readers and has been proposed as the primary source of processing differences between native speakers and second language learners. A better understanding of how basic properties of memory retrieval can contribute to misinterpretations will help us understand how language comprehension is impacted for these less successful language users.