Causes and Consequences of Lexical Activation

词汇激活的原因和后果

• 批准号: 6775466
• 负责人: ARTHUR G SAMUEL
• 金额: $ 20.5万
• 依托单位: STATE UNIVERSITY NEW YORK STONY BROOK
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 财政年份: 1994
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 1994-09-30 至 2009-05-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/6775466
• 关键词: auditory feedback; behavioral /social science research tag; brain electrical activity; clinical research; cognition; comprehension; cues; human subject; neural information processing; phonology; psycholinguistics; speech recognition; syntax; vocabulary; voice

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Understanding language is one of the most fundamental human cognitive abilities. It plays an important role in normal development, and is the major means for acquiring information in many domains. A number of psychological disorders (e.g., schizophrenia) can disrupt the normally impressive functioning of this system, greatly exacerbating the negative consequences of these disorders. Psycholinguists have made significant progress in clarifying the structures and processes that underlie language comprehension. Despite this progress, much remains to be learned about how words are represented in a person's "mental lexicon". Critical remaining issues in this area revolve around questions of lexical representation, and lexical access. Theories must specify how the presentation of a spoken word leads to a particular lexical representation becoming activated, and what the effects of such activation are: What effect does one active lexical representation have on others, and on units at other levels of representation? The current proposal includes a large set of theoretically-driven empirical studies of lexical activation. The empirical investigations are organized into three interlocking groups of experiments. One set of studies examines how phonetic variation can affect lexical access, and can even change the lexical representations themselves. Such variation can have surprisingly powerful effects on how words are represented in the lexicon. A second set of studies examines even more fundamental changes in the lexicon: How do adults add new items to their mental lexicons, and what are the consequences of such changes? The third set of experiments investigates the dynamics of lexical competition: How does the activation of one lexical item affect the activation levels of other lexical entries? The product of the proposed research will be a much better understanding of the architecture of the system that accomplishes language comprehension. These studies will provide a much more detailed picture of how the mental lexicon changes over both the short term, and the longer term. Such an understanding is critical to our understanding language processing. In turn, because language is such a fundamental cognitive ability, progress in describing language processing will enhance our understanding of human cognition, under both normal and disordered conditions.

描述（由申请人提供）：理解语言是人类最基本的认知能力之一。它在正常发展中起着重要作用，是在许多领域中获取信息的主要手段。许多心理疾病（例如，精神分裂症）可能会破坏该系统的令人印象深刻的功能，从而极大地加剧了这些疾病的负面后果。心理语言学家在澄清语言理解的基础结构和过程方面取得了重大进展。尽管取得了这种进步，但关于如何在一个人的“精神词典”中表示单词的代表还有很多尚待了解。该领域的关键剩余问题围绕词汇表示问题和词汇访问。理论必须指定口语的呈现如何导致特定的词汇表示被激活，以及这种激活的影响是什么：一个主动词汇表示对他人的影响有什么影响？ 当前的建议包括一系列理论上驱动的词汇激活经验研究。实证研究被组织成三个互锁的实验组。一组研究检查了语音变化如何影响词汇访问，甚至可以改变词汇表示本身。这种变化对词典中的单词的表示形式产生了令人惊讶的强大影响。第二组研究研究了词典的更根本变化：成年人如何在精神词典中添加新项目，以及这种变化的后果是什么？第三组实验研究了词汇竞争的动力学：一个词汇项目的激活如何影响其他词汇条目的激活水平？ 拟议的研究的产物将更好地理解完成语言理解的系统的体系结构。这些研究将提供有关精神词典在短期和长期中如何变化的更详细图片。这种理解对于我们理解语言处理至关重要。反过来，由于语言是一种基本的认知能力，因此描述语言处理的进步将在正常和无序条件下增强我们对人类认知的理解。