The Development and Redevelopment of Lexical and Sublexical Representations

语言是人类最基本的认知能力之一。它在正常的生活中起着重要的作用 可持续发展，是许多领域获取信息的主要手段。一些心理上的 精神障碍(如精神分裂症、自闭症)可以极大地扰乱这个系统正常的、令人印象深刻的功能 加剧了这些疾病的负面后果。 心理语言学家在确定构成其基础的结构和过程方面取得了重大进展 语言理解能力。在过去的二十年里，我们的实验室学到了很多东西 关于单词如何在一个人的“心理词典”中呈现。我们的研究已经开始澄清 口语单词的呈现会导致特定的词汇表征被激活，而 这种激活的影响是(例如，一个活跃的词汇表征对其他词汇表征具有什么影响，以及对 其他级别的代表)。 目前的提案继续我们对口语处理的调查，重点是 词汇和次词汇系统的动态特性：通过知觉学习，有连续的 重新开发用于访问词条的子词法表示法。建议数 该项目包括一大套理论驱动的亚词汇知觉学习的实证研究。这个 实验使用了一系列不同的方法，以确保通过 汇聚操作。这套关于知觉学习的研究将提供对如何 知觉系统重构了它的次词汇表征。到目前为止，我们在这方面的工作表明 该系统对这样的重组是适当保守的，只是将表示改为 当语音变化是说话者(保守派)的特征时，调整语音变化 调整/重组原则，或“CA/RP”)。拟议的实验将跟踪代表性的 随着时间的推移，不同的变种暴露的次数，以及不同变种的语音细节。 拟议研究的成果将是更好地了解 完成语言理解的系统。这些研究将提供更详细的图景 词汇和次词汇表征如何在短期和长期内发生变化。这样的一种 理解是我们理解语言处理的关键。因为语言是如此的基本 认知能力、描述语言加工的进步将增强我们对人类的理解 在正常和无序状态下的认知。

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, autism) can disrupt the normally impressive functioning of this system, greatly exacerbating the negative consequences of these disorders. Psycholinguists have made significant progress in specifying the structures and processes that underlie language comprehension. Over the course of the last two decades, our laboratory has learned a great deal about how words are represented in a person’s “mental lexicon”. Our research has begun to clarify how the presentation of a spoken word leads to a particular lexical representation becoming activated, and what the effects of such activation are (e.g., what effect one active lexical representation has on others, and on units at other levels of representation). The current proposal continues our investigation of spoken language processing, with a focus on the dynamic properties of lexical and sublexical systems: Through perceptual learning, there is continuous redevelopment of the sublexical representations that are used to access the lexical entries. The proposed project includes a large set of theoretically-driven empirical studies of sublexical perceptual learning. The experiments use a range of different methodologies, in order to assure correct theoretical inferences through converging operations. The set of studies on perceptual learning will provide a detailed understanding of how the perceptual system restructures its sublexical representations. Our work to date in this area has shown that the system is appropriately conservative about such restructuring, only changing the representations to accommodate phonetic variation when the variation is characteristic of a speaker (the Conservative Adjustment/Restructuring Principle, or “CA/RP”). The proposed experiments will track the representational shift, across time, across number of exposures to a variant, and across the phonetic details of the variants. 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 lexical and sublexical representations change over both the short term, and the longer term. Such an understanding is critical to our understanding language processing. 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.