The Dynamics of Semantic Processing

语言是人类独有的能力，对我们的精神和社会生活至关重要。尽管它的重要性，我们还没有一个完整的认知或神经解释的关键方面的语言。在拟议的研究中，我关注这样一个方面：当你遇到一个词时，它的含义是如何浮现在脑海中的？词义提取是阅读、听力和其他涉及语言理解的技能中的一个关键组成部分。我的长期目标是解释语义处理，这是提取词义的基本过程。我的短期目标是通过调查儿童和成人对具体和抽象单词的语义处理行为和相关的神经活动来测试各种理论解释的可行性。我将利用两个事实来阐明语义处理的新观点：a）与不同单词相关的意义或语义信息存在变异性; B）这种变异性会对行为和神经产生影响。词语在其意义的丰富性方面各不相同，人们可以将语义丰富性定义为许多不同的语义概念化的函数。例如，通过研究单词的感觉运动丰富性的影响，我们可以测试语义框架，该框架提出感觉运动信息是我们如何表示和检索单词含义的重要方面。这样的框架在解释我们如何理解可以通过感官体验到的具体词汇（如卡车）的含义方面显示出了希望，但它们很难解释我们如何理解更抽象的词汇（如真理）的含义。以前的研究大多集中在具体名词的处理上，但这些词只占我们词汇量的不到一半。解释更多的抽象意义（抽象名词、动词）是如何获得和表示的，对于大多数领先的语义理论来说是一个挑战，也是拟议研究中要解决的问题。拟议的工作将利用一系列任务和程序，包括成熟的范式（例如，词汇和语义决策任务，EEG）以及新兴和创新的方法（例如，megastudy方法，手势捕捉和启动），以调查有关我们如何从语言中获得意义的重要新问题。这些研究涉及儿童和成人参与者，因为任何完整的语义处理理论都需要解释词义的获得和提取。此外，在发展研究中，我们可以测试来自不同语义理论的预测，考察词义的习得如何随着年龄、感觉运动经验、认知发展和其他因素而变化。这项研究将使我们能够开发一个完整的语义处理帐户，有助于推进该领域对人类语言能力的解释。

Language is a uniquely human capacity, and one that is essential to our mental and social lives. Despite its importance, we do not yet have a complete cognitive or neural explanation for key aspects of language. In the proposed research I focus on one such aspect: When you encounter a word, how does its meaning come to mind? Word meaning retrieval is a key component process in reading, listening, and other skills that involve language understanding. My long-term goal is to explain semantic processing, the fundamental process by which word meanings are retrieved. My short-term goal is to test the viability of the various theoretical accounts that have been proposed by investigating children's and adults' semantic processing behaviour and associated neural activity for both concrete and abstract words. I will shed new light on semantic processing by capitalizing on two facts: a) there is variability in the meaning or semantic information associated with different words, and b) there are behavioural and neural consequences of this variability. Words vary in the richness of their meanings, and one can define semantic richness as a function of many different conceptualizations of semantics. For instance, by studying the effects of words' sensorimotor richness we can test semantic frameworks that propose that sensorimotor information is an essential aspect of how we represent and retrieve word meanings. Such frameworks show promise in explaining how we understand the meanings of concrete words, like truck, that can be experienced through the senses, but they struggle to explain how we understand the meanings of more abstract words, like truth. Much of the previous research has tended to focus on processing of concrete nouns, yet these words represent less than half of our vocabulary. Explaining how more abstract meanings (abstract nouns, verbs) are acquired and represented is a challenge for most of the leading semantic theories and one that will be tackled in the proposed research.The proposed work will utilize a range of tasks and procedures, including well-established paradigms (e.g., lexical and semantic decision tasks, EEG) as well as emerging and innovative methods (e.g., the megastudy approach, gesture capture and priming), to investigate important new questions about how we derive meaning from language. The studies involve both child and adult participants because any complete theory of semantic processing needs to explain both acquisition and retrieval of word meanings. Further, in developmental studies we can test predictions derived from different semantic theories, examining how acquisition of word meanings varies as a function of age, sensorimotor experience, cognitive development, and other factors. This research will allow us to develop a complete account of semantic processing, helping to advance the field towards an explanation of the human language capacity.