LANGUAGE COMPREHENSION

描述(改编自《调查员摘要》)： 提议的研究是开发一种关于人们如何使用知识的理论 理解句子的语言。这项研究考察了认知能力 正常、完整的成年人在阅读和听力过程中的过程。这个 拟议中的实验旨在揭示支配 读者和听者在句法分析中对语法信息的使用 (即，为提取意义所需的对句子的结构分配)， 并假设这些原则将形成一个 总体上支配认知的原则的不同子集。 该提案有三个不同的重点。一系列实验检验了 “深度优先”理论的基本假设促使我们 之前的研究。我们的理论地位受到了质疑 这种解析是广度优先且并行的，因此多个备选方案 结构分析处于激活状态。我们建议对这两项进行强有力的测试 各就各位。 第二个系列的实验验证了我们已经提出的主张，即两个 不同类型的短语处理方式有很大的不同。主要 关系是根据我们的深度优先原则处理的 高级的，附加到单一确定句法中的 结构。相反，非主要关系与 句子的主题定义域，以及语义和非语言 在我们称之为识解的过程之后，可以使用信息来源， 以确定它们在这一领域内的具体解释。 第三个系列的实验考察了句子的处理 远程依赖关系。它测试了一些当前关于 移动的元素(填充物)如何与 它被解释(缺口)，并提出了一些关于填充物如何 可以通过接收事件结构中的角色或通过接收 与话语联系在一起的解释。 这项拟议的研究使用了眼睛跟踪和其他实验技术 认知心理学，并致力于心理语言学的发展 理论。心理语言学理论的最新进展取得了实质性的进展 对语言障碍，特别是失语症的分析的影响。我们 预计这些新的分析将导致更多的理解和 改善此类疾病的治疗。

DESCRIPTION (Adapted from the Investigator's Abstract): The goal of the proposed research is to develop a theory of how people use knowledge of language to comprehend sentences. The research examines the cognitive processes of normal, intact adults during reading and listening. The proposed experiments are designed to uncover the principles that govern readers' and listeners' use of grammatical information in sentence parsing (i.e. the assignment of structure to a sentence, needed to extract meaning), and is predicated on the assumption that these principles will form a distinct subset of the principles that govern cognition in general. The proposal has three distinct foci. One series of experiments examines the basic assumptions of the 'depth-first' theory that has motivated our previous research. Our theoretical position has been challenged by claims that parsing is breadth-first and parallel, so that multiple alternative structural analyses are activated. We propose strong tests of these two positions. A second series of experiments tests a claim we have made, that two different types of phrases are processed quite differently. Primary relations are processed according to the depth-first principles we have advanced earlier, being attached into a single determinate syntactic structure. Non-primary relations are instead associated with a thematically-defined domain of a sentence, and semantic and non-linguistic sources of information can be used, following a process we call construal, to determine their specific interpretation within this domain. A third series of experiments examines the processing of sentences with long-distance dependencies. It tests some current theoretical claims about how the moved element (the filler) can be related to the position in which it is interpreted (the gap), and advances some novel ideas about how fillers might be interpreted by receiving a role in event structure or by receiving a discourse-linked interpretation. The proposed research uses eyetracking and other techniques of experimental cognitive psychology, and is designed to the development of psycholinguistic theory. Recent advances in psycholinguistic theory have had substantial impact on the analysis of language disorders, especially aphasia. We anticipate that these new analyses will lead to increased understanding and improved treatment of such disorders.