The Role of Cognitive Coherence in Reference Resolution

描述(申请人提供)：我们对对象、事件和情景之间的语义关系的感知对我们学习和推理环境的能力具有深远的影响。特别是，认识到两个事件或对象彼此相似，或者一个是另一个事件或对象的原因或结果，对于理解世界是如何运行的至关重要。我们区分不同语义关系的能力也是语言理解的基础，越来越多的研究表明，我们推断不同事件之间存在什么关系的能力对于成功的代词解释是必要的。代词(例如，他们、她、它)在成功交流的信息处理过程中起着核心作用，但由于其语义贫乏的性质，似乎对语言理解系统构成了挑战。最近的研究表明，成功的代词解释需要考虑到句子之间的语义连贯关系(例如，X是Y的结果，X类似于Y)。然而，这些连贯表征的语言和认知特性还没有被很好地理解：我们不知道这些表征是特定于语言的(也可能是特定于代词解释过程的)，还是更具全局性的，在语言和非语言的认知表征之间共享。此外，连贯效应如何与其他已被发现影响代词解释的因素相互作用的问题仍然悬而未决。我们的长期目标是更多地了解不同的语言和视觉线索如何有助于人们感知或推断事件之间的语义关系，这些关系是如何表现的，以及它们是如何影响语言处理的。这项拟议的研究是迈向这一目标的第一步，重点是调查作为代词解释基础的连贯相关表征的性质。为此，我们开发了一种新颖的实验范式，将视觉世界的眼球跟踪与启动相结合。这项研究有三个具体目标：(1)检验在代词解释过程中与连贯相关的表征被激活的直接证据；(2)确定这些连贯表征在多大程度上具有全域性；(3)调查代词解释是否受到语言表征的指导，以及在多大程度上受到语言表征的指导，尤其是回指依存表征，这些语言表征不能来自连贯。这项研究的意义超出了代词解释的范畴。虽然这些实验调查了代词解释背后的表征，但它们构成了更广泛的研究连续体的第一步，旨在加深我们对人们如何识别和表征事件之间的语义关系的理解。新的眼动+启动范式潜在地提供了一种在语言和视觉两个不同领域研究因果关系和相似性的统一方法，使我们能够从一个新的角度来研究因果关系和相似性的知觉，这得益于语言和视觉对连贯关系的交叉研究。 与公共健康相关：对代词(她、它、他们)解释中涉及的心理表征的研究--特别是它们在语言和认知方面的普遍性--可能有助于我们理解第二语言学习者、儿童和语言和/或记忆受损的个人(例如，失语症或阿尔茨海默病患者)所面临的语篇层面的挑战。此外，拟议的研究有可能将语言学和视觉空间研究的见解结合在一起，从而加深我们对人类如何识别和表示事件之间的语义关系的理解-这是认知的一个方面，对于我们学习和推理环境的能力至关重要。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Our perceptions of the semantic relations that hold between objects, events and situations have far-reaching consequences for our ability to learn and reason about our environment. In particular, recognizing that two events or objects are similar to each other, or that one is a cause or a consequence of the other, is central for understanding how the world works. Our ability to distinguish different semantic relations is also fundamental for language comprehension, and a growing body of research suggests that our ability to infer what relations hold between different events is necessary for successful pronoun interpretation. Pronouns (e.g. they, she, it) play a central role in the information management process that underlies successful communication, but, due to their semantically impoverished nature, appear to pose a challenge for the language comprehension system. Recent research suggests that a successful account of pronoun interpretation needs to take into account the semantic coherence relations that hold between sentences (e.g. X is a result of Y, X is similar to Y). However, the linguistic and cognitive properties of these coherence representations are not yet well- understood: It is not known whether these representations are specific to language (and possibly specific to the pronoun interpretation process), or whether they are more domain-general and shared between language and non-linguistic cognitive representations. In addition, the question of how coherence effects interact with other factors that have been found to influence pronoun interpretation is still open. Our long-term goal is learn more about how different linguistic and visual cues contribute to the semantic relations that people perceive or infer to hold between events, how these relations are represented and how they influence language processing. The proposed research is the first step towards this goal, and focuses on investigating the nature of the coherence- related representations that underlie pronoun interpretation. To do this, we develop a novel experimental paradigm that combines visual-world eye-tracking with priming. The proposed research has 3 specific aims: (1) to test for direct evidence for coherence-related representations being activated during pronoun interpretation, (2) to determine how domain-general these coherence representations are, and (3) to investigate whether and to what extent pronoun interpretation is guided by linguistic representations, in particular anaphoric dependency representations, that cannot be derived from coherence. The significance of this research extends beyond pronoun interpretation. Although these experiments investigate the representations underlying pronoun interpretation, they constitute the first steps in a broader research continuum that aims to further our understanding of how people recognize and represent semantic relations between events. The new eye-tracking+priming paradigm potentially offers a unified way of investigating causality and similarity in two different domains, language and vision, allowing us to investigate the perception of causality and similarity in a new light by benefiting from cross-fertilization between linguistic and visual research on coherence relations. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: Research on the mental representations involved in the interpretation of pronouns (she, it, they) - in particular the extent of their linguistic and cognitive generality - can potentially contribute to our understanding of the discourse-level challenges faced by second-language learners, children, and linguistically- and/or memory- impaired individuals (e.g., individuals with aphasia or Alzheimer's disease). In addition, the proposed research has the potential to bring together insights from linguistic and visuo-spatial research, thereby furthering our understanding of how humans recognize and represent semantic relations between events - an aspect of cognition that is crucial for our ability to learn and reason about our environment.