Structure Generation in Language Comprehension

University Of Maryland, College Park, College Park MD

Investigators

Abstract

This project aims to understand how speakers encode and navigate structured mental representations, through a series of studies of how speakers' knowledge of grammatical constraints guides online interpretation processes. Previous research has found that the real-time use of grammatical constraints shows a remarkably uneven profile of successes and failures. Comprehenders show impressive facility in deploying some rather complex grammatical constraints, but they show striking inaccuracy in other cases that one might expect to be rather easy. This "selective fallibility" profile is unexpected under current theoretical models, and it presents an opportunity for new insights into how speakers store and manipulate sentence structures in memory. The project explores the hypothesis that the uneven profile reflects the different contributions of prospective and retrospective memory search processes. The project contrasts the predictions of two approaches to linguistic memory retrieval: one based upon structure-guided search and another based upon parallel cue-based retrieval in content-addressable memory. The project consists of six sets of studies on constraints such as subject-verb agreement, forwards and backwards coreference relations, bound variable anaphora, negative polarity item (NPI) licensing, and null subject licensing. The experiments use four experimental techniques (self-paced reading, event-related brain potentials (ERPs), speeded grammaticality judgments, and eye-tracking during reading). The project will gather data on the processing of English, Spanish, Hindi, and Brazilian Portuguese. It will also support a new collaboration with researchers in Brazil. The project addresses a basic challenge to the integration of linguistics, psycholinguistics, and the cognitive neuroscience of language. It has been common to assume a clear division of labor between the mechanisms that speakers use to survive the pressures of real-time language processing, and another set of mechanisms that capture speakers' linguistic acceptability judgments. However, if it is possible to understand linguistic computation as real-time computation, then it becomes feasible to integrate the concerns of linguistics, psycholinguistics and cognitive neuroscience. The project supports broad-based training of students, including members of underrepresented minorities and undergraduate and high school students. The project will also create new international partnerships with teams of researchers in the UK, Germany, and Brazil, and will help to develop infrastructure for experimental research on Portuguese and the indigenous languages of Brazil. More broadly, by elucidating the detailed mechanisms used to encode and navigate structured representations in memory in healthy adults, the project will contribute to an understanding of normal and atypical language learning and age-related difficulties in language processing.