A multi-disciplinary approach to understanding interactions between lexical and affective processing

词语如何具有意义（词汇语义学）是人类心智最不为人所知的功能之一，也是少数几个基本心理功能之一，这些功能不能轻易从非人类动物的比较研究中获益，因为没有其他动物像人类那样使用语言。我的研究重点是帮助认知科学理解词义作为一个基本的生物过程，与其他基本的跨物种生物过程，如接近和回避行为，情绪处理，学习和模式识别。理解词义之所以具有挑战性，有很多原因，包括神经心理学和大脑成像证据都表明大脑不会将词义视为一件事。我们已经知道，计算词义需要使用许多不同的大脑区域，并且在大脑受损后会以许多不同的方式分解。词汇语义学的科学研究的一个方法论问题是，在很大程度上依赖于人类对意义的判断作为一个“解释变量”，用于科学解释。与其依赖这些判断作为解释，不如解释这些判断背后的心理过程。这就是我要做的。我使用一种计算方法从大量的人类生成的文本中提取有关词义的信息。我的研究重点特别是提取与词语相关的情感信息，以及了解情感信息如何影响人类对词语及其含义的理解。我使用实验和脑成像方法的结合，以及用于从文本中提取词义的计算机算法的分析。

How words have meaning (lexical semantics) is one of the least understood functions of the human mind, and one of a handful of basic psychological functions that cannot easily benefit from comparative studies of non-human animals, since no other animals use language in the way that humans do. My research is focused on helping cognitive science understand word meaning as a basic biological process that is related to other basic cross-species biological processes such as approach and avoidance behavior, emotional processing, learning, and pattern recognition. There are many reasons why understanding word meaning is challenging, including the fact that neuropsychological and brain imaging evidence both suggest that the brain does not treat word meaning as one thing. We already know that computing word meaning uses many different brain regions and that it breaks down in a many different ways following brain damage. One methodological problem with the scientific study of lexical semantics is that much of has relied on human judgments of meaning as an 'explanatory variable', to be used in scientific explanations. Instead of relying on those judgments as explanations, it is better to explain what sort of psychological processes underlie those judgments. This is what I am trying to do. I use a computational method for extracting information about word meaning from a large corpus of human-generated text. My research focuses in particular on extracting information about emotions that are associated with words, and on understanding how that emotional information impacts on how humans access words and their meanings. I use a combination of experimental and brain imaging methods, as well as an analysis of the computer algorithms that are used to extract word meaning from text.