Doctoral Dissertation Research: Linguistic illusions and incremental interpretation

博士论文研究：语言错觉与增量解释

• 批准号: 2141348
• 负责人: Colin Phillips
• 金额: $ 1.66万
• 依托单位: University of Maryland, College Park
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2022
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2022-03-01 至 2024-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2141348&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Doctoral; Dissertation; Research; Linguistic; illusions

Adults are very good at understanding sentences quickly and easily. Psycholinguists often use their occasional mistakes as a way to understand the mechanisms that underlie this speed and ease. This project investigates two varieties of language comprehension errors, which reveal the underlying computations that allow language users to understand most sentences so successfully. The first of these errors involves the failure to notice anomalous word substitutions. For example, when asked "what is the name of the holiday during which children dress up and go door to door giving candy?", many people do not notice the substitution of "giving" for "receiving" and simply answer "Halloween". The failure to detect this type of word substitution can be thought of as a type of illusion - the comprehender imagines the sentence to be different from how it actually is. This project investigates what causes these illusions - for example, whether "giving" was simply mis-read, or if the meaning of the word was mis-remembered, or if attention was mis-directed toward other parts of the sentence. Identifying the processing mis-step that causes this particular error provides clues as to where comprehenders are vulnerable to misunderstanding more generally. The second case study concerns the processing of a special class of words known as negative polarity items or NPIs. These are words like "ever" and "any", which are generally appropriate in negative contexts (e.g. "John doesn’t have any money.") but sound strange or ungrammatical in positive contexts (e.g. "John has any money."). Prior work has shown that an NPI in a positive context can seem, at first glance, to be appropriate if there is a negative context nearby, another type of linguistic illusion. This project investigates the specific circumstances under which this mistaken perception arises, in addition to asking what people think these ungrammatical sentences actually mean when they judge them to be grammatical.This project uses a combination of speeded and unspeeded judgments, eye-tracking methods, and sentence repetition tasks to measure people’s responses to illusion sentences. Two initial experiments on word substitution illusions test how often mistakes occur when the substitution is in a declarative sentence instead of a question, and when the substituted word has been primed through previous exposure. Two independent experiments investigate the role of attention by measuring eye movements as comprehenders read sentences with various types of anomalies, including both word substitutions and spelling errors. Three additional experiments on NPI illusions investigate the causes and consequences of these errors. First, two experiments using speeded acceptability measures test the influence of broader conversational context and expectations on illusion rates, and the role of the precise timing of the appearance of the NPI. Finally, a sentence repetition experiment, in which subjects attempt to recall an NPI illusion sentence after a delay, reveals the inferred meaning of these sentences.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

成年人非常擅长快速，轻松地理解句子。心理语言学家经常将偶尔的错误作为一种理解这种速度和轻松速度的机制的一种方式。该项目调查了两种语言理解错误的变化，它们揭示了允许语言用户如此成功理解大多数句子的基本计算。这些错误中的第一个涉及未注意到异常单词替换。例如，当被问及“假期的名字是什么名字，在哪个孩子打扮，然后挨家挨户给糖果？”时，许多人没有注意到替换“给予“接收”的“给予”，而只是回答“万圣节”。未能检测到这种类型的替换的单词可以被认为是一种幻觉 - 理解的想象力与实际的方式不同。该项目调查了导致这些幻想的原因 - 例如，“给予”是简单的读书，还是单词的含义被错误地记录了，还是将注意力错误地指向了句子的其他部分。识别导致此特定错误的处理失误步骤提供了有关理解者容易误解更普遍的线索的线索。第二个案例研究涉及处理一类称为负极性项目或NPI的特殊单词。这些词是像“曾经”和“任何”之类的词，通常在负面环境中适当（例如，“约翰没有任何钱”。先前的工作表明，乍一看，在积极环境中的NPI似乎是合适的，如果靠近另一类的语言幻觉，则是合适的。该项目调查了这种错误的看法的特定情况，除了询问人们认为这些不语法的句子是在判断他们是语法时实际上意味着什么。该项目结合了加快和无避开的法官的组合，令人眼花track乱的方法，以及句子重复的任务来衡量人们对幻觉句子的回应。单词替代幻觉的两个初步实验测试替换为声明性句子而不是问题时发生错误的频率，以及通过以前的暴露进行了替代时。两个独立的实验通过测量眼球运动来研究注意力的作用，因为理解者读取各种类型异常的句子，包括单词替换和拼写错误。关于NPI幻觉的另外三个实验研究了这些错误的原因和后果。首先，使用加快可接受性措施的两个实验测试了更广泛的对话环境和期望对幻觉率的影响，以及NPI出现的精确时机的作用。最后，一个句子重复实验，其中的受试者试图在延误后回忆起NPI幻觉句子，揭示了这些句子的推断含义。该奖项反映了NSF的法定任务，并被认为是通过基金会的智力优点和更广泛影响的审查标准通过评估而被视为珍贵的支持。