Causes and Consequences of Lexical Activation

描述(申请人提供)：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。许多心理障碍(如精神分裂症)可以扰乱这一系统正常的令人印象深刻的功能，极大地加剧这些障碍的负面后果。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。尽管取得了这一进展，但关于单词如何在一个人的“心理词典”中呈现，仍有许多需要了解。这一领域的关键剩余问题围绕着词汇表征和词汇获取的问题。理论必须具体说明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。实证研究分为三组相互关联的实验。一组研究考察了语音变化如何影响词汇通达，甚至可以改变词汇表征本身。这种变化可能会对单词在词典中的表示方式产生令人惊讶的强大影响。第二组研究考察了词汇中更根本的变化：成年人如何将新条目添加到他们的心理词典中，以及这种变化的后果是什么？第三组实验考察了词汇竞争的动态：一个词项的激活如何影响其他词条的激活水平？ 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。这些研究将为心理词汇在短期和长期内的变化提供更详细的图景。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，无论是在正常条件下还是在无序条件下。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Understanding language is one of the most fundamental human cognitive abilities. It plays an important role in normal development, and is the major means for acquiring information in many domains. A number of psychological disorders (e.g., schizophrenia) can disrupt the normally impressive functioning of this system, greatly exacerbating the negative consequences of these disorders. Psycholinguists have made significant progress in clarifying the structures and processes that underlie language comprehension. Despite this progress, much remains to be learned about how words are represented in a person's "mental lexicon". Critical remaining issues in this area revolve around questions of lexical representation, and lexical access. Theories must 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 empirical investigations are organized into three interlocking groups of experiments. One set of studies examines how phonetic variation can affect lexical access, and can even change the lexical representations themselves. Such variation can have surprisingly powerful effects on how words are represented in the lexicon. A second set of studies examines even more fundamental changes in the lexicon: How do adults add new items to their mental lexicons, and what are the consequences of such changes? The third set of experiments investigates the dynamics of lexical competition: How does the activation of one lexical item affect the activation levels of other lexical entries? The product of the proposed research will be a much better understanding of the architecture of the system that accomplishes language comprehension. These studies will provide a much more detailed picture of how the mental lexicon changes over both the short term, and the longer term. 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, under both normal and disordered conditions.