Gahl Susanne, Menn Lise, Ramsberger Gail, Jurafsky Daniel S, Elder Elizabeth, Rewega Molly, Audrey L Holland
Harvard University, MA, Cambridge, USA.
Brain Cogn. 2003 Nov;53(2):223-8. doi: 10.1016/s0278-2626(03)00114-3.
This study investigates three factors that have been argued to define "canonical form" in sentence comprehension: Syntactic structure, semantic role, and frequency of usage. We first examine the claim that sentences containing unaccusative verbs present difficulties analogous to those of passive sentences. Using a plausibility judgment task, we show that a mixed group of aphasics performed significantly better on unaccusatives than on passives. We then turn to the observation that passives are generally harder than actives for aphasics. We show that this effect is modulated by lexical bias, i.e., the likelihood that a verb appears in a given syntactic structure: Passives of passive-bias verbs were significantly easier than passives of active-bias verbs. More generally, sentences whose structure matches the lexical bias of the main verb are significantly easier than sentences in which structure and lexical bias do not match. These findings suggest that "canonical form" reflects frequency and lexical biases.
本研究调查了在句子理解中被认为可定义“规范形式”的三个因素：句法结构、语义角色和使用频率。我们首先考察这样一种观点，即包含非宾格动词的句子会呈现出与被动句类似的困难。通过一个合理性判断任务，我们发现失语症患者的混合组在非宾格动词句子上的表现显著优于被动句。然后我们转向这样一个观察结果，即对于失语症患者来说，被动句通常比主动句更难理解。我们表明，这种效应受到词汇偏向的调节，也就是说，一个动词出现在给定句法结构中的可能性：被动偏向动词的被动句比主动偏向动词的被动句明显更容易理解。更普遍地说，其结构与主要动词的词汇偏向相匹配的句子比结构与词汇偏向不匹配的句子明显更容易理解。这些发现表明，“规范形式”反映了频率和词汇偏向。
