Doctoral Dissertation Research: The processing of NPI licensing and intrusion

博士论文研究：NPI许可与入侵的处理

基本信息

批准号：
1730289
负责人：
John Bailyn
金额：
$ 1.43万
依托单位：
SUNY at Stony Brook
依托单位国家：
美国
项目类别：
Standard Grant
财政年份：
2017
资助国家：
美国
起止时间：
2017-08-01 至 2021-01-31
项目状态：
已结题

来源：
https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1730289&HistoricalAwards=false
关键词：
Doctoral Dissertation Research processing NPI

项目摘要

Language comprehension relies on brain mechanisms which decode incoming signals into meaningful messages in fractions of a second. This involves (i) encoding of the incoming signal, (ii) access/retrieval of information stored in long term memory linking words to both meanings and syntactic function, (iii) temporary maintenance of complex representations of structured phrases, clauses, and sentences, and (iv) a mapping these syntactically structured objects to meanings. How our brains realize this uniquely human capacity, however, is still poorly understood. The present project uses high temporal resolution experimental techniques--including measurements of eye-movements and electrophysiological recordings (EEG) during reading--in order to study in detail the nature and time-course of the various sub-systems involved in extracting sentence-level meaning in real time. A further important feature of this investigation is the focus on cross-linguistic universals and variation by studying how these mechanisms work when processing a well-studied language like English compared to a less well-studied language like Turkish. The specific focus of this work is on the processing of cross-linguistically common expressions known as negative polarity items (NPIs). These include English words like "any" or "ever". Study of these elements in linguistics is important as they expose the way language relates to logical aspects of semantics. NPIs impose demands on the sentences that contain them: they must co-occur with "licensors" like negation (e.g., compare the deviant "Everyone ate *anything" to the well-formed "Nobody ate anything"). Further, NPIs must bear a structural relationship with their licensors in order to be well-formed; it is not enough for a licensor to be merely present (e.g., compare "The man that nobody knows ate *anything" versus "Nobody that the man knows ate anything"). Of central interest to the present project is the fact that these types of dependencies appear to be subject to so-called "intrusion effects" where, in the dynamics of incremental processing, parsing mechanisms appear to sometimes be tricked by the input, resulting in a situation where structurally ineligible licensor/NPI relationships are temporarily processed as if they were licit. This is a species of "grammaticality illusion", where an ungrammatical structure is temporarily judged as well-formed. Such cases have been of interest to language processing researchers, similar to work on illusions in understanding visual cognition, since they appear to reveal important details of how comprehension systems work by understanding cases where they fail or can be "tricked". Competing accounts have been offered in the psycholinguistics literature to explain these intrusion effects with NPIs: (i) cue based retrieval takes intrusion to be a special case of retrieval and dependency resolution error arising from mechanisms posited to underlie a wide variety of types of linguistic dependency processing, and (ii) erroneous pragmatic licensing, which posits that the mechanisms underlying intrusion are specific to NPIs. The present project examines these issues with a special focus on Turkish. Crucially, in Turkish, unlike English/German, NPIs precede their licensors (they realize a prospective/predictive dependency). This work thus systematically examines intrusive NPI licensing cross-linguistically to probe the nature of universals and variation in language processing.

语言理解依赖于大脑机制，这些机制将传入的信号解码为有意义的消息，而部分则是一秒钟的分数。这涉及（i）编码传入信号，（ii）访问/检索存储在长期记忆中的信息，将单词链接到含义和句法函数，（iii）临时维护结构化短语，条款和句子的复杂表示，以及（iv）这些语法结构化的对象与均值绘制的均值。然而，我们的大脑如何意识到这种独特的人类能力仍然知之甚少。本项目使用高的时间分辨率实验技术 - 包括对阅读过程中眼动和电生理记录（EEG）的测量 - 以详细研究参与实时提取句子级别含义的各种子系统的性质和时间顺序。这项调查的另一个重要特征是通过研究这些机制在处理像英语这样的良好语言时如何起作用，重点是跨语言普遍性和变化。这项工作的具体重点在于处理跨语言公共表达式称为负极性项目（NPI）。其中包括英语单词，例如“任何”或“ ever”。对这些元素在语言学中的研究很重要，因为它们揭示了语言与语义的逻辑方面的关系。 NPI对包含它们的句子提出了要求：他们必须与“许可人”（例如否定者）共同发生（例如，将偏见的“每个人都吃了任何东西”与形成良好的“没人吃东西”）。此外，NPI必须与许可人建立结构关系才能得到良好的形式；许可人仅出现就不够（例如，比较“没人知道的人 *任何人”与“任何人都知道任何东西”的人）。本项目的核心兴趣是这样的事实，即这些类型的依赖项似乎受到所谓的“入侵效应”的影响，在这种情况下，在增量处理的动态中，解析机制有时似乎被输入所欺骗，从而导致结构上不合格的许可/NPI关系暂时处理的情况，就像他们是固定的一样。这是一种“语法幻觉”的物种，其中暂时判断了不形式的语法结构。这种情况对语言处理研究人员感兴趣，类似于理解视觉认知方面的幻觉，因为它们似乎通过理解失败或可以“被欺骗”的情况来揭示理解系统如何工作的重要细节。心理语言学文献中提供了竞争性帐户来解释对NPI的这些入侵效应：（i）基于提示的检索将其入侵是检索和依赖解决方案的特殊情况，其基于的机制是基于多种类型的语言依赖性处理的机制，以及（ii）在侵犯机构的情况下，该机构对侵犯的侵犯，这是对侵犯的特定机构，该机构对某种侵犯了，以使其对某种侵犯。本项目以特别关注土耳其语研究了这些问题。至关重要的是，在土耳其语中，与英语/德语不同，NPI在其许可方之前（他们实现了前瞻性/预测依赖性）。因此，这项工作系统地研究了侵入性的NPI许可，以探究普遍性和语言处理变化的性质。