Doctoral Dissertation Research: Linguistic illusions and incremental interpretation

成年人非常擅长快速轻松地理解句子。心理语言学家经常用他们偶尔犯的错误来理解这种快速和轻松背后的机制。这个项目研究了两种类型的语言理解错误，揭示了允许语言使用者如此成功地理解大多数句子的底层计算。第一个错误是没有注意到异常的单词替换。例如，当被问到“孩子们盛装打扮挨家挨户送糖果的节日叫什么？”时，许多人没有注意到“送”取代了“收”，而简单地回答“万圣节”。不能发现这种类型的词替换可以被认为是一种错觉——理解者想象的句子与实际情况不同。这个项目调查了导致这些错觉的原因——例如，“给予”是否只是被误解了，或者是这个词的意思被错误地记住了，或者是注意力被错误地引向了句子的其他部分。识别导致这一特定错误的处理错误，可以为理解者更容易产生误解的地方提供线索。第二个案例研究涉及一类特殊的词的处理，称为负极性项目或npi。像“ever”和“any”这样的词通常适用于否定语境(例如：“约翰没有钱。”)但是在肯定的语境中听起来很奇怪或不合语法。“约翰有钱。”)先前的研究表明，如果附近有一个消极的语境，那么在积极语境中的NPI乍一看似乎是合适的，这是另一种类型的语言错觉。除了询问人们在判断这些不合语法的句子合乎语法时认为它们实际上是什么意思之外，这个项目还调查了这种错误认知产生的具体情况。这个项目结合了快速判断和非快速判断、眼球追踪方法和句子重复任务来测量人们对幻觉句子的反应。两个关于单词替代错觉的初步实验测试了当替换出现在陈述句而不是疑问句中，以及当替换的单词在之前的曝光中被启动时，错误发生的频率。两个独立的实验通过测量阅读者在阅读不同类型的异常句子（包括单词替换和拼写错误）时的眼球运动来研究注意力的作用。另外三个关于NPI错觉的实验研究了这些错误的原因和后果。首先，两个使用速度可接受性测量的实验测试了更广泛的会话上下文和期望对错觉率的影响，以及NPI出现的精确时间的作用。最后，在一个句子重复实验中，被试在一段时间后尝试回忆NPI错觉句子，揭示了这些句子的推断意义。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。

Adults are very good at understanding sentences quickly and easily. Psycholinguists often use their occasional mistakes as a way to understand the mechanisms that underlie this speed and ease. This project investigates two varieties of language comprehension errors, which reveal the underlying computations that allow language users to understand most sentences so successfully. The first of these errors involves the failure to notice anomalous word substitutions. For example, when asked "what is the name of the holiday during which children dress up and go door to door giving candy?", many people do not notice the substitution of "giving" for "receiving" and simply answer "Halloween". The failure to detect this type of word substitution can be thought of as a type of illusion - the comprehender imagines the sentence to be different from how it actually is. This project investigates what causes these illusions - for example, whether "giving" was simply mis-read, or if the meaning of the word was mis-remembered, or if attention was mis-directed toward other parts of the sentence. Identifying the processing mis-step that causes this particular error provides clues as to where comprehenders are vulnerable to misunderstanding more generally. The second case study concerns the processing of a special class of words known as negative polarity items or NPIs. These are words like "ever" and "any", which are generally appropriate in negative contexts (e.g. "John doesn’t have any money.") but sound strange or ungrammatical in positive contexts (e.g. "John has any money."). Prior work has shown that an NPI in a positive context can seem, at first glance, to be appropriate if there is a negative context nearby, another type of linguistic illusion. This project investigates the specific circumstances under which this mistaken perception arises, in addition to asking what people think these ungrammatical sentences actually mean when they judge them to be grammatical.This project uses a combination of speeded and unspeeded judgments, eye-tracking methods, and sentence repetition tasks to measure people’s responses to illusion sentences. Two initial experiments on word substitution illusions test how often mistakes occur when the substitution is in a declarative sentence instead of a question, and when the substituted word has been primed through previous exposure. Two independent experiments investigate the role of attention by measuring eye movements as comprehenders read sentences with various types of anomalies, including both word substitutions and spelling errors. Three additional experiments on NPI illusions investigate the causes and consequences of these errors. First, two experiments using speeded acceptability measures test the influence of broader conversational context and expectations on illusion rates, and the role of the precise timing of the appearance of the NPI. Finally, a sentence repetition experiment, in which subjects attempt to recall an NPI illusion sentence after a delay, reveals the inferred meaning of these sentences.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.