CAUSES AND CONSEQUENCES OF LEXICAL ACTIVATION

理解语言是人类最基本的认知能力之一。它在正常发展中发挥着重要作用，是许多领域获取信息的主要手段。心理语言学家在阐明语言理解的结构和过程方面取得了重大进展。近年来，这一领域的一个核心问题已经变得很明显，那就是词汇通达。大多数理论都具体说明了口语单词的呈现如何导致特定的词汇表征被激活，以及这种激活的影响是什么：一个活跃的词汇表征对其他词汇表征以及其他表征水平上的单位有什么影响？目前的建议包括一大套理论驱动的词汇激活实证研究。这些实验使用了一系列不同的方法，以确保通过收敛运算进行正确的理论推断。有几个实验研究了结构问题：词条之间的联系是什么性质的？获取词汇表征涉及哪些类型的输入和输出代码？输入(感知)和输出(生产)过程是否使用相同的单位类型(例如，音素、分音节和音节)？其他实验探索了词汇处理的各个方面：词汇获取是一个纯粹的自下而上的自主过程，还是该体系结构是交互的，具有自上而下的信息流？处理是严格按照“从左到右”的方式进行，还是系统使用某些形式的异步处理？更广泛地说，词汇加工的时间进程是什么？这项拟议研究的成果将是对完成语言理解的系统架构的更好理解。这样的理解对于我们理解语言处理是至关重要的。反过来，由于语言是一种基本的认知能力，在描述语言加工方面的进步将增强我们对人类认知的理解。

Understanding language is one of the most fundamental human cognitive abilities. It plays an important role in normal development, and is a major means for acquiring information in many domains. Psycholinguists have made significant progress in clarifying the structures and processes that underlie language comprehension. In recent years, it has become clear that a central issue in this area is lexical access. Theories most specify how the presentation of a spoken word leads to a particular lexical representation becoming activated, and what the effects of such activation are: What effect does one active lexical representation have on others, and on units at other levels of representation? The current proposal includes a large set of theoretically-driven empirical studies of lexical activation. The experiments use a range of different methodologies, in order to assure correct theoretical inferences through converging operations. Several of the experiments investigate structural issues: What is the nature of the connections between lexical entries? What types of input and output codes are involved in accessing lexical representations? Are the same unit types (e.g., phonemes, demisyllables, and syllables) used by both input (perception) and output (production) processes? Other experiments explore aspects of lexical processing: Is lexical access a purely bottom-up, autonomous process, or is the architecture interactive, with top- down information flow? Does processing proceed in a strictly "left-to-right" fashion, or does the system instead use some forms of asynchronous processing? More generally, what is the time course of lexical processing? The product of the proposed research will be a much better understanding of the architecture of the system that accomplishes language comprehension. Such an understanding is critical to our understanding language processing. In turn, because language is such a fundamental cognitive ability, progress in describing language processing will enhance our understanding of human cognition.