Processing Effects of Syncretism in Agreement Comprehension

Descrizione del progetto

In che modo la mente risolve l’ambiguità nella comprensione del linguaggio

La comprensione del linguaggio parlato o scritto richiede al cervello di risolvere costantemente le ambiguità a una velocità notevole. Una fonte di ambiguità ancora poco approfondita è il «sincretismo formale», ossia quando una singola forma lessicale assume molteplici significati grammaticali, come avviene in molte lingue slave. Con il sostegno del programma di azioni Marie Skłodowska-Curie, il progetto ProSync mira a indagare in che modo il sincretismo influisca sull’elaborazione della concordanza e perché il sincretismo sia rilevante. Integrando le conoscenze derivanti dalla morfologia formale e dalle teorie sull’elaborazione basata sulla memoria, e avvalendosi di esperimenti di tracciamento oculare, lettura a ritmo autonomo e valutazione rapida, ProSync elaborerà un quadro teorico e computazionale unificato su come l’ambiguità venga superata nell’elaborazione linguistica in tempo reale.

Obiettivo

When we try to understand others, we need to process language. This means building sentences hidden in the speech signal back up. In this task, we face a fundamental obstacle rooted deep in the structure of human language—ambiguity. A type of ambiguity known as form syncretism is seen in formal features. For example, in the Slavic language Czech, the form ‘kočk-y’ (‘cat’, ‘cats’ or ‘of a cat’) corresponds to three different combinations of case and number. In these languages, understudied within the psycholinguistics, syncretism is ever present and has substantial effects on processing. It is the crucial factor in the emergence of agreement attraction, a prolifically studied effect used to test how the language processor links words within sentences together. A prominent theory of agreement attraction is the cue-based retrieval model, which captures how language structure and working memory jointly achieve the task of agreement. However, this approach cannot yet explain why syncretism matters. On the other hand, several theories of formal morphology such as nanosyntax have recently been able to successfully describe patterns of syncretism, appealing to a hierarchical structure within word forms. The goal of ProSync is to discover under what exact conditions syncretism influences agreement processing and by integrating insights from formal morphology and cue-based retrieval to explain and capture why syncretism matters both theoretically and within a computational model. ProSync will use methods capable of tapping into both representations and processes in the minds of comprehenders, in particular self-paced reading, eye-tracking, and speeded judgements. Overall, this research will bring together knowledge from established psycholinguistic effects and from current morphological theories to better understand how our minds can process language rapidly and overcome ambiguity inherent in the signal, allowing for efficient communication between speakers and hearers.