Doctoral Dissertation Research: Investigating the role of distribution in syntactic comprehension

人们在日常语言使用中会遇到各种各样的句法结构，无论是通过阅读还是口语会话。在某些情况下，句子可能是模棱两可的，并且有多种含义。例如，在《间谍看到男人用双筒望远镜》中，一种解释是间谍正在通过双筒望远镜看东西，而另一种解释是男人拿着双筒望远镜。然而，尽管这种模棱两可，人们仍然能够在一种单一的解释上趋同。这背后的机制今天仍然存在争议，因为许多因素已经被证明指导理解。本论文将探讨陌生结构的经验如何影响语言加工。经验被认为在理解中起着很大的作用，然而，尽管它在理论模型中扮演着重要的角色，但仍然没有直接证据表明人们是否真的跟踪了分布，即目标结构和竞争结构的相对频率。这篇博士论文研究的是，在保持总体曝光率不变的情况下，人们是否可以通过直接操纵句法结构的相对频率来隐含地获取句法分布信息：相对于另一个竞争结构(“饭菜需要煮熟的蔬菜”)，一个陌生的方言结构(“饭菜需要烹饪”，“饭菜需要烹饪”)的概率。方言结构主要与宾夕法尼亚州西部的一种方言有关，对该地区以外的大多数人来说都不熟悉。在一系列实验中，使用自定节奏的阅读来测试随着时间的推移，较高比例的方言结构是否会导致较低的处理难度。研究人员还测试了动词“需要”的分布信息是否可以概括为一个相关的动词(即“想要”)。这个项目将为语言学习理论提供信息，因为它比以前的研究提供了更强的分布式学习测试。它还寻求对语法和阅读理解的最佳学习策略具有实际意义。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

People encounter a variety of syntactic structures in everyday language use, whether through reading or spoken conversation. In some cases, sentences can be ambiguous and have more than one meaning. For example, in "The spy saw the man with the binoculars", one interpretation is that the spy is looking through the binoculars, while an alternative interpretation is that the man has the binoculars. Yet, despite this ambiguity, people are still able to converge on a single interpretation. The mechanisms behind this are still debated today as many factors have been shown to guide comprehension. This dissertation project will investigate how experience with an unfamiliar structure affects language processing. Experience is thought to play a large role in comprehension, however, despite its large role in theoretical models, there is still no direct evidence of whether people actually keep track of distribution i.e., the relative frequency of a target structure and competing structures. This doctoral dissertation project investigates whether people can implicitly acquire syntactic distributional information by directly manipulating the relative frequency of syntactic structures while holding overall exposure constant: the probability of an unfamiliar, dialectal structure ("The meal needs cooked", a variation of "The meal needs to be cooked") relative to another competing structure ("The meal needs cooked vegetables"). The dialectal structure is mainly associated with a dialect from Western Pennsylvania, and is unfamiliar to most people outside of this region. In a series of experiments, self-paced reading is used to test whether a higher proportion of the dialectal structure leads to less processing difficulty over time. The investigators also test whether the distributional information from the verb "needs" can be generalized to a related verb (i.e. "wants"). This project will inform theories of language learning as it provides a stronger test of distributional learning compared to previous studies. It also seeks to have practical implications for optimum learning strategies for grammar and reading comprehension.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.