Structure Building in Language Production

人类有一种非凡的能力，可以用结构良好的句子有效地表达新颖复杂的思想。这种独特的人类能力，即造句子的能力，在人类活动的许多方面（如果不是全部的话）都至关重要。然而，人们对说话人的大脑是如何造句子的仍然知之甚少。本项目旨在研究句子生成的认知机制，重点研究使人类语言区别于非语言交际系统的两个基本特性：递归和位移。人类语言允许递归；说话者可以制造出包含另一个句子的句子，比如“女孩相信男孩喜欢狗。”人类语言也允许移位：说话者可以造出一些句子，在这些句子中，正常情况下应该紧密相连的两个事物却显得相距甚远，比如在“女孩相信男孩喜欢哪只狗？”中，第一个短语（“哪只狗”）与最远的动词（“喜欢”）的关系比与更近的动词（“相信”）的关系更密切。递归和位移是语言的两个标志性特征，它们使语言变得复杂和丰富，但研究人员对说话者的大脑是如何创造包含它们的句子知之甚少。目前的项目旨在通过研究两种截然不同的语言的使用者如何创建涉及递归和位移的句子来填补这一知识空白。本项目通过比较心理语言学实验，在两种不同类型的语言中研究支持递归和置换生成句子的认知机制。研究小组主要使用结构启动来研究说话者使用什么样的构建块，以及他们如何组合这些构建块来创建包含递归和置换的句子。结构启动指的是说话者重复使用他们最近遇到的句子结构的倾向，这种效应可以用来推断说话者使用什么样的构建块，以及他们如何将这些块组合成结构良好的句子。本研究中产生的跨语言数据直接比较，以更好地了解语法差异如何影响句子生成的认知机制。采用最先进的数据分析方法，包括层次贝叶斯建模。该项目包括对本科生、研究生和博士后进行语言学、认知心理学和统计学方面的高级培训，并建立学生和研究人员之间的国际合作。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。

Humans have the remarkable ability to express novel and complex thoughts in well-formed sentences efficiently. This uniquely human ability, the ability to produce sentences, is critical in many, if not all, aspects of human activities. However, how speakers' minds create sentences remains poorly understood. This project aims to study the cognitive mechanisms for sentence production, focusing on two fundamental properties that make human languages distinct from non-linguistic communicative systems: recursion and displacement. Human languages allow recursion; speakers can produce sentences that contain another sentence inside it, as in "The girl believes that the boy likes the dog." Human languages also allow displacement: speakers can produce sentences in which two things that should be normally close together appear far apart, as in "Which dog did the girl believe that the boy likes?", where the first phrase ("which dog") is more closely related to the farthest verb ("likes") than the closer one ("believe"). Recursion and displacement are two hallmark properties of language that contribute to its complexity and richness, but researchers know little about how speakers' minds create sentences involving them. The current project aims to fill this knowledge gap by studying how speakers of two very different languages create sentences involving recursion and displacement.This project investigates the cognitive mechanisms supporting the production of sentences involving recursion and displacement specifically through comparative psycholinguistic experimentation in two typologically distinct languages. The research team primarily uses structural priming to study what kind of building blocks speakers use and how they combine these building blocks to create sentences involving recursion and displacement. Structural priming refers to the tendency of speakers to reuse the sentence structures they have recently encountered, and this effect can be used to make various inferences about what kind of building blocks speakers use and how they combine these blocks to create well-formed sentences. The cross-linguistic data generated in this research are directly compared to better understand how grammatical differences affect cognitive mechanisms for sentence production. State-of-the-art data analysis methods involving hierarchical Bayesian modeling are used. This project involves advanced training in linguistics, cognitive psychology, and statistics for undergraduate students, graduate students, and post-doctoral scholars and also establishes international collaborations between students and researchers.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.