Doctoral Dissertation Research: Processing the Dynamicity of Events in Language

世界是一个动态变化的地方，充满了不同种类的事件（“发生的事情”），如削土豆，跑步，擦桌子，扔球，跳舞等人类对事件的感知和概念化是语言和心灵理论的核心。本项目研究以下问题：当理解者遇到描述一个事件的语言输入时，什么信息指导着该事件的心理表征是如何构建的？如何整合来自各种语言和非语言来源的信息以创建对事件的理解？该项目的最终目的是阐明认知过程，使网络开发者能够快速更新他们对动态变化事件的语言描述的理解。该项目的预期发现将推进对使人类能够在真实的时间内快速理解语言的机制的科学理解。这些发现有可能对预测语言处理的认知机制产生新的见解，这可能为预测文本生成，机器翻译和语言学习和教学等应用提供基础科学知识。本项目旨在培养本科生在不同层次的研究，让学生获得心理语言学研究的前沿技能和专业知识。本项目使用行为方法来研究语法和非语法信息源如何引导研究者对动态变化事件的预期和心理表征。三种不同的信息来源将被调查：（一）语法信息，（二）语篇层面的信息，（三）关于现实世界的事件的信息。研究者联合收割机结合了形式/词汇语义学、语用学、心理语言学和认知心理学对事件表征的见解，以促进我们对人类思维和语言之间关系的理解。该项目的成果有可能以一种渐进的和预期的方式，显著地进一步理解和了解语言使用者如何理解语言输入中描述的动态变化的事件。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并被认为值得通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估来支持。

The world is a dynamically changing place, filled with different kinds of events ('things that happen') such as peeling a potato, running, wiping a table, throwing a ball, dancing, etc. Humans' perception and conceptualization of events is central for theories of language and mind. This project investigates the following questions: When a comprehender encounters linguistic input describing an event, what information guides how a mental representation of that event is constructed? How is information from various linguistic and non-linguistic sources integrated to create an understanding of an event? This project ultimately aims to shed light on the cognitive processes that enable comprehenders to rapidly update their understanding of linguistic descriptions of dynamically changing events. The anticipated findings of this project will advance scientific understanding of the mechanisms that enable humans to rapidly understand language in real time. These findings have the potential to generate new insights into the cognitive mechanisms of predictive language processing, which can potentially provide basic scientific knowledge beneficial for applications such as predictive text generation, machine translation, and language learning and teaching. This project aims to foster undergraduate research at various levels, allowing students to acquire cutting-edge skills and expertise in psycholinguistic research.The project uses behavioral methods to investigate how grammatical and non-grammatical sources of information guide comprehenders' expectations and mental representations of dynamically changing events. Three different sources of information will be investigated: (i) grammatical information, (ii) discourse-level information, and (iii) information about real-world events. The investigators combine insights from formal/lexical semantics, pragmatics, psycholinguistics, and cognitive psychology about event representations to advance our understanding of the relationship between the human mind and language. The results of this project have the potential to significantly further understanding and knowledge of how language users comprehend the dynamically changing events described in linguistic input, in an incremental and anticipatory manner.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.