Understanding language comprehension

这项拟议的研究旨在为人们如何利用事件知识来促进语言理解提供洞察。本研究的一个重要目的是考察与动词相关的不同语法变化如何影响语义记忆中事件知识的激活。第二个目标是研究动词的屈折变化如何与事件的时间结构和因果结构相互作用，以确定人们如何解析代词的指称--这是一个对成功的语言理解至关重要的过程。第三个目标是洞察两个大脑半球是如何联合和单独处理语法变化和事件知识的，以确定理解谁在句子中对谁做什么的关键过程。最后，本研究使用事件相关脑电位法(ERP)在毫秒时间尺度上提供了对语言理解过程中这些关键过程的神经认知基础的洞察。

The proposed research is designed to provide insight into how people use knowledge of events to facilitate language comprehension. One important goal of this research is that it investigates how different grammatical inflections associated with verbs influences the activation of event knowledge in semantic memory. A second goal is to examine how verbal inflections interact with the temporal and causal structure of events to determine how people resolve the referents for pronouns - a process crucial to successful language comprehension. A third goal is to provide insight into how the two cerebral hemispheres process grammatical inflections and event knowledge jointly and individually to determine the critical process of understanding who is doing what to whom in sentences. Finally, this research uses Event-Related Brain Potential methodology (ERP) to provide insight into the neurocognitive underpinnings of these crucial processes during language comprehension on a millisecond time-scale.