汉语成语产生中的语法结构启动效应

以60名汉语言专业本科生为被试,采用改进后的瞬时回忆范式,探讨汉语四字格成语产生中的语法结构启动效应。结果表明,无论启动成语和目标成语的语素结构是否相同,只要两者语步结构相同,就会在汉语成语产生中出现语法结构启动效应。本结果初步表明,在结构较为凝固的汉语四字格成语产生过程中也存在着语法生成与选择过程,这种语法生成与选择过程主要来自汉语成语的语步结构,是一种抽象的语法结构的生成。     

印尼留学生汉语句子产生中的跨语言句法启动

采用图片描述范式探讨了不同年级印尼留学生汉语句子产生中的跨语言句法启动效应。结果发现,印尼语主动句启动条件下中年级印尼留学生没有产生跨语言句法启动,而高年级印尼留学生产生了跨语言句法启动;印尼语被动句启动条件下中、高年级印尼留学生均产生明显的跨语言句法启动。本研究结果初步表明,印尼留学生印尼语－汉语间跨语言句法启动与词序无关而与汉语水平有关。即使启动句为词序不同的印尼语被动句时,也能产生印尼语－汉语间跨语言句法启动。中年级印尼留学生句法表征中母语句法特征占优势,高年级印尼留学生句法表征中母语和汉语两种句法     

Generation of referring expressions: assessing the Incremental Algorithm

A substantial amount of recent work in natural language generation has focused on the generation of 'one-shot' referring expressions whose only aim is to identify a target referent. Dale and Reiter's Incremental Algorithm (IA) is often thought to be the best algorithm for maximizing the similarity to referring expressions produced by people. We test this hypothesis by eliciting referring expressions from human subjects and computing the similarity between the expressions elicited and the ones generated by algorithms. It turns out that the success of the IA depends substantially on the 'preference order' (PO) employed by the IA, particularly in complex domains. While some POs cause the IA to produce referring expressions that are very similar to expressions produced by human subjects, others cause the IA to perform worse than its main competitors; moreover, it turns out to be difficult to predict the success of a PO on the basis of existing psycholinguistic findings or frequencies in corpora. We also examine the computational complexity of the algorithms in question and argue that there are no compelling reasons for preferring the IA over some of its main competitors on these grounds. We conclude that future research on the generation of referring expressions should explore alternatives to the IA, focusing on algorithms, inspired by the Greedy Algorithm, which do not work with a fixed PO.     

阅读方式和学习次数对中文词汇的产生效应的影响

产生效应是指朗读单词的记忆成绩要好于默读单词的。目前存在特异观和强度观两种理论解释,特异观强调朗读的相对特殊性,强度观强调朗读单词的编码强度高于默读单词的。为了检验两种理论,本研究采用“学习-再认”的实验范式,将阅读方式分别设置为被试内和被试间变量,通过两项实验考察阅读方式和学习次数对中文词汇的产生效应的影响。实验1采用被试内设计考察阅读方式和学习次数对产生效应的影响。结果发现阅读方式和学习次数的主效应显著,二者的交互作用不显著。实验2将阅读方式设置为被试间变量,采用混合设计考察阅读方式和学习次数对产生效应的影响。结果发现学习次数的主效应显著,阅读方式的主效应和二者的交互作用不显著。结果表明产生效应未随着项目编码强度的增强而增强,支持特异观。     

Word informativity influences acoustic duration: Effects of contextual predictability on lexical representation

Language-users reduce words in predictable contexts. Previous research indicates that reduction may be stored in lexical representation if a word is often reduced. Because representation influences production regardless of context, production should be biased by how often each word has been reduced in the speaker’s prior experience. This study investigates whether speakers have a context-independent bias to reduce low-informativity words, which are usually predictable and therefore usually reduced. Content word durations were extracted from the Buckeye and Switchboard speech corpora, and analyzed for probabilistic reduction effects using a language model based on spontaneous speech in the Fisher corpus. The analysis supported the hypothesis: low-informativity words have shorter durations, even when the effects of local contextual predictability, frequency, speech rate, and several other variables are controlled for. Additional models that compared word types against only other words of the same segmental length further supported this conclusion. Words that usually appear in predictable contexts are reduced in all contexts, even those in which they are unpredictable. The result supports representational models in which reduction is stored, and where sufficiently frequent reduction biases later production. The finding provides new evidence that probabilistic reduction interacts with lexical representation.     

The role of the input on the development of the LC bias: A crosslinguistic comparison

Previous studies have described the existence of a phonotactic bias called the Labial–Coronal (LC) bias, corresponding to a tendency to produce more words beginning with a labial consonant followed by a coronal consonant (i.e. “bat”) than the opposite CL pattern (i.e. “tap”). This bias has initially been interpreted in terms of articulatory constraints of the human speech production system. However, more recently, it has been suggested that this presumably language-general LC bias in production might be accompanied by LC and CL biases in perception, acquired in infancy on the basis of the properties of the linguistic input. The present study investigates the origins of these perceptual biases, testing infants learning Japanese, a language that has been claimed to possess more CL than LC sequences, and comparing them with infants learning French, a language showing a clear LC bias in its lexicon. First, a corpus analysis of Japanese IDS and ADS revealed the existence of an overall LC bias, except for plosive sequences in ADS, which show a CL bias across counts. Second, speech preference experiments showed a perceptual preference for CL over LC plosive sequences (all recorded by a Japanese speaker) in 13- but not in 7- and 10-month-old Japanese-learning infants (Experiment 1), while revealing the emergence of an LC preference between 7 and 10 months in French-learning infants, using the exact same stimuli. These crosslinguistic behavioral differences, obtained with the same stimuli, thus reflect differences in processing in two populations of infants, which can be linked to differences in the properties of the lexicons of their respective native languages. These findings establish that the emergence of a CL/LC bias is related to exposure to a linguistic input.     

Learning to fail: Reoccurring tip-of-the-tongue states

This experiment looked at elicited tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) states to test the hypothesis that making an error once makes people more likely to make it again, via an implicit learning mechanism. We present a methodology that allows us to determine whether error reoccurrences are due to error learning or to the fact that some items tend to pose repeated difficulty to participants. We elicited TOTs by asking participants to supply the word that fitted a given definition. Each time participants indicated that they were experiencing a TOT they were randomly assigned a delay of either 10 or 30 seconds, during which they were asked to keep trying to retrieve the item. After the delay, the correct answer was supplied. We argue that this longer delay in a TOT state amounts to greater implicit learning of the erroneous state. A period of 48 hours later, participants returned to the laboratory and were asked to supply the words for the same definitions as those seen on Day 1. Results showed that TOTs were almost twice as likely to reoccur on words that had elicited a TOT and been followed by a long delay than on those that had been followed by a short delay.     

Semantic relatedness among objects promotes the activation of multiple phonological codes during object naming

In a picture–word interference experiment the authors demonstrate that a semantic–categorical relation between a to-be-named target picture and a context picture promotes the phonological activation of the to-be-ignored context picture. No such phonological activation is observed if the objects are semantically unrelated. This finding gives further insight into the mechanisms that modulate the activation flow in the conceptual-lexical system during speech planning. In contrast to recent picture–picture interference studies, the results provide direct evidence that the phonological activation of a context object is dependent on its semantic processing.     

The influence of sentential position on noun phrase structure priming

This article explores the interaction between global sentence context and local syntactic decision making. Specifically, four noun phrase (NP) structural priming experiments investigated whether the position of an NP within a sentence increased speakers' tendency to repeat primed structure. We crossed the position of the NP with the structure of the NP, such that NPs could be sentence initial or final in prime sentences. We further manipulated whether the to-be-modified target NP was sentence initial or final. Structural persistence effects were consistently observed, but there was no influence of parallel position. Rather, sentence-initial NP primes had a stronger influence on subsequent syntactic decisions than sentence-final primes, suggesting a primacy effect. Sentence-initial target NPs contributed to this primacy effect, while sentence-final target NPs did not. We argue that this primacy effect arises as the result of greater processing demands and resources for early than for late sentence constituents as well as deeper encoding and more focused attention when processing the beginnings of sentences.     

Do verb bias effects on sentence production reflect sensitivity to comprehension or production factors?

Speakers should be motivated to produce easy-to-understand sentences, but they must successfully say sentences that are harder to produce. Four experiments assessed how verb bias influences the mention of the optional “that” in sentence-complement structures. Without the “that”, such sentences can be incorrectly interpreted as including direct objects (garden paths), and especially so after direct-object-biased verbs (compared to embedded-clause-biased verbs). But direct-object-biased verbs are rarely produced as sentence-complement structures, and so they might be harder to produce as such. Experiments 1 and 2 show that speakers mention the “that” more after direct-object-biased verbs than after embedded-clause-biased verbs. Experiment 3a shows that sentences with verbs biased toward neither direct objects nor embedded subjects were often produced with the “that”, and Experiment 3b shows that postverbal noun phrases after neither-biased verbs are interpreted as direct objects less than direct-object-biased verbs and so should cause a milder garden path. Thus, frequent “that” mention is not sensitive to the tendency of a verb to be followed by a direct object, but by how rarely the verb has been produced in the formulated structure.