CAUSES AND CONSEQUENCES OF LEXICAL ACTIVATION

语言理解是人类最基本的认知能力之一。 它在正常发育中起着重要作用，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，人们已经清楚地认识到，在这一领域的一个中心问题是词汇通达。 大多数理论都详细说明了一个口语单词的呈现如何导致一个特定的词汇表征被激活，以及这种激活的效果是什么：一个活跃的词汇表征对其他词汇表征以及其他表征水平的单位有什么影响？目前的建议包括大量的理论驱动的词汇激活的实证研究。 实验使用了一系列不同的方法，以确保正确的理论推理，通过收敛操作。 一些实验研究结构问题：什么是词汇条目之间的连接的性质？ 什么类型的输入和输出代码参与访问词汇表征？ 是相同的单位类型（例如，音素，半音节和音节）的输入（感知）和输出（生产）过程中使用？ 其他实验探索词汇处理的方面：词汇访问是一个纯粹的自下而上，自主的过程，还是架构互动，自上而下的信息流？ 处理过程是严格按照“从左到右”的方式进行的，还是系统使用某种形式的异步处理？ 更一般地说，词汇加工的时间进程是什么？所提出的研究的产品将是一个更好地理解的体系结构的系统，完成语言理解。 这种理解对于我们理解语言处理至关重要。 反过来，由于语言是一种基本的认知能力，描述语言处理的进展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.