Doctoral Dissertation Research: Presupposition projection in conditionals and conjunctions: Developmental and psycholinguistic evidence

人类语言使我们能够区分我们打算传达的主要新信息和我们认为理所当然的背景信息，即，我们的预设。例如，“我又赢了”中的“again”表示说话者之前已经赢了。预设的一个特点是，它们被保存在逻辑运算符（如否定）之下：像“我没有再次获胜”这样的句子继续暗示先前的胜利。预设如何与语境相互作用，即预设如何投射，一直是自然语言意义研究中的一个核心和热点问题。本论文旨在通过研究理论分歧的句子中的预设投射来为这场争论做出贡献。该项目从一个创新的角度接近这一经验领域，转向在线处理和儿童语言习得，这可以为人类语义能力的逻辑和推理系统提供新的启示。该项目包括培训和指导本科生研究人员。该项目将对成人和儿童进行一系列心理语言学实验，目的是区分两类理论：（i）预测条件句和连词的预设应该根据携带预设的表达式的位置而变化的理论，以及（ii）那些预测一致的前提的。研究一探讨了成年人预设投射的实时加工过程，目的是识别预设投射的行为特征。研究二转向儿童语言，在那里混淆语用因素的影响最小化。最后，研究3更详细地探讨了其他非语言因素如何影响对预设的判断。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。

Human language allows us to distinguish the main new information we intend to communicate from background information we take for granted, i.e., our presuppositions. For example, 'again' in 'I won again' suggests that it was already established that the speaker had won previously. A hallmark of presuppositions is the fact that they are preserved under logical operators like negation: a sentence like 'I didn’t win again' continues to suggest a prior victory. The issue of how presuppositions interact with their surrounding context – how presuppositions project – has been a central and hotly debated topic in the study of natural language meaning. This dissertation project aims to contribute to this debate by examining presupposition projection in sentences where theories diverge. The project approaches this empirical terrain from an innovative angle, turning to online processing and child language acquisition, which can shed new light on the logical and inferential systems that underlies human semantic competence. The project includes the training and mentoring of undergraduate researchers.The project will carry out a series of psycholinguistic experiments with adults and children, with the goal of distinguishing between two classes of theories: (i) theories that predict that the presuppositions of conditionals and conjunctions should vary based on the position of the presupposition-carrying expression, and (ii) ones that predict uniform presuppositions across the board. Study 1 probes adults' real-time processing of presupposition projection, with the goal of identifying behavioral signatures of presupposition projection. Study 2 turns to child language, where the influence of confounding pragmatic factors is minimized. Finally, Study 3 probes in more detail how other, non-linguistic factors influence judgments about presuppositions.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.