Doctoral Dissertation Research: Tracking alternatives: Experimental investigations into focus and scalar inference

在人类交流中，会话参与者不仅根据他们对声音模式、词义和语法的了解来使用语言，而且他们还会从对话者的语言使用中进行推理和推断。也就是说，说话者传达的不仅仅是他们所说的话的字面内容；相反，听者会做出超出对话者字面意思的推论。存在着许多众所周知的语言现象，其中一个句子所传达的意义取决于相关的事物，但没有明确提及。这些没有说出口的相关内容被称为备选方案。这个项目将研究听者如何理解选择性敏感现象，以及人类大脑如何实时处理这些现象。当前的项目研究了语义计算（例如在焦点敏感表达式的词汇语义中，例如only）和语用推理（例如在标量推理中）中引发的替代方案。第一个研究目标是开发实验范式，以跟踪在这两个经验领域中引起的替代方案。为此，该项目将利用替代的心理语言反射和替代敏感表达——建立在现有的关于焦点和焦点替代的工作中使用的范例。其次，语境如何以及在多大程度上限制了相关替代方案的空间，这是一个悬而未决的问题。因此，该项目还将研究上下文对焦点和标量替代激活的影响。实验采用离线行为判断任务、跨模态语义启动和视觉世界眼动追踪进行。实验的一般逻辑将是在遇到目标时跟踪（焦点或标量）备选项的激活：焦点元素或较弱的标量项。在这两个经验领域中，我们将首先研究局部上下文（即句子级属性）的影响，然后研究更广泛的话语上下文的影响。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

In human communication, conversational participants not only use language based on their knowledge of sound patterns, word meanings, and grammar, but they also reason about and draw inferences from their interlocutors’ language use. That is, speakers communicate more than just the literal content of the words they say; and conversely, listeners make inferences beyond what is literally said by their interlocutor. There exist multiple well-known linguistic phenomena in which the meaning conveyed by a sentence depends on things that are relevant, but were not explicitly mentioned. These relevant things that were left unsaid are called alternatives. This project will investigate how alternative-sensitive phenomena are understood by hearers, and how they are processed in real time by the human mind.The current project investigates alternatives evoked in semantic computation (e.g. in the lexical semantics of focus-sensitive expressions such as only) and pragmatic reasoning (e.g. in scalar inference). The first research goal is to develop experimental paradigms to track the alternatives that are evoked in these two empirical domains. To do so, the project will utilize the psycholinguistic reflexes of alternatives and alternative-sensitive expressions – building on paradigms used in existing work on focus and focus alternatives. Second, it is an open question how and to what extent context constrains the space of relevant alternatives. This project will therefore also investigate the effect of context on the activation of focus and scalar alternatives. A series of experiments using offline behavioral judgments tasks, cross-modal semantic priming, and visual world eye-tracking will be conducted. The general logic of the experiments will be to track the activation of (focus or scalar) alternatives upon encountering a target: a focused element or weaker scalar term. In both empirical domains, we will first look at the effect of local context (i.e. sentence-level properties), and then at the effect of broader discourse context.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.