Memory access in language: how we store and retrieve linguistic information

Description du projet

Mieux comprendre la façon dont la mémoire façonne le langage

Dans la trame complexe de la communication humaine, notre capacité à comprendre et à établir des liens dépend du stockage et de la récupération complexes des informations linguistiques. Néanmoins, les modèles de mémoire linguistique dominants ont souvent été étroitement ciblés, négligeant de vastes domaines de fonctions mémorielles. Dans ce contexte, le projet MEMLANG, financé par l’UE, entend élargir les horizons de la recherche sur la mémoire linguistique. Cette initiative révolutionnaire propose d’élargir l’applicabilité des modèles de mémoire, en les reliant à divers phénomènes linguistiques dans les domaines de la linguistique, des sciences cognitives et de l’intelligence artificielle. La mission du projet consiste à relier les modèles de mémoire aux modèles informatiques de connaissances lexicales, de règles grammaticales et de théories du discours. Ce faisant, il ambitionne de développer une approche globale et adaptable de l’accès à la mémoire.

Objectif

To be able to talk and to understand each other, we have to continuously store and retrieve linguistic information. In linguistics, the dominant approach to studying the processes of storing and recall of linguistic information from short-term memory assumes that we can access all items in parallel and that the most highly activated items are the most likely to be retrieved. Activation, in turn, can be boosted by the requirements of the current cognitive context.
This model is related to theories of memory developed independently of linguistics. In linguistics, it has been supported by rich research on production and comprehension. The model, however, has been applied very narrowly. It focuses only on the recall of some syntactic items, for instance, the recall of arguments during the processing of a verb. Other functions of memory fall outside the approach.
The project’s core idea is that the memory model can be applied to many other cases in which memory has a decisive role. We will do this by linking the model to theories of other language phenomena developed in linguistics, cognitive sciences and artificial intelligence. First, we will link it to computational models of lexical knowledge, which will enable us to fully and formally represent what the current cognitive context is and to build an indiscriminate and general approach to memory access. Second, we will link it to computational models of grammatical knowledge to understand how we store and recall grammatical rules. Finally, we will link it to discourse theories to have an analysis of storage and recall of textual information.
The project will lead to a new view on the memory model, one that is general and cross-domain. It will provide a more principled account of how memory affects language, will give us a new insight into why the theories of lexical knowledge, grammatical knowledge and discourse theories work, and it will make it possible to tie together accounts that are often treated as independent.