Knoeferle Pia, Crocker Matthew W, Scheepers Christoph, Pickering Martin J
Department of Computational Linguistics, Saarland University, 66041 Saarbrücken, Germany.
Cognition. 2005 Feb;95(1):95-127. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2004.03.002.
Studies monitoring eye-movements in scenes containing entities have provided robust evidence for incremental reference resolution processes. This paper addresses the less studied question of whether depicted event scenes can affect processes of incremental thematic role-assignment. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants inspected agent-action-patient events while listening to German verb-second sentences with initial structural and role ambiguity. The experiments investigated the time course with which listeners could resolve this ambiguity by relating the verb to the depicted events. Such verb-mediated visual event information allowed early disambiguation on-line, as evidenced by anticipatory eye-movements to the appropriate agent/patient role filler. We replicated this finding while investigating the effects of intonation. Experiment 3 demonstrated that when the verb was sentence-final and thus did not establish early reference to the depicted events, linguistic cues alone enabled disambiguation before people encountered the verb. Our results reveal the on-line influence of depicted events on incremental thematic role-assignment and disambiguation of local structural and role ambiguity. In consequence, our findings require a notion of reference that includes actions and events in addition to entities (e.g. Semantics and Cognition, 1983), and argue for a theory of on-line sentence comprehension that exploits a rich inventory of semantic categories.
对包含实体的场景中的眼动监测研究，为增量指称消解过程提供了有力证据。本文探讨了一个较少被研究的问题，即所描绘的事件场景是否会影响增量题元角色分配过程。在实验1和实验2中，参与者在观看施事-动作-受事事件时，听取初始结构和角色存在歧义的德语动词第二位句子。实验研究了听众通过将动词与所描绘的事件相关联来消解这种歧义的时间进程。这种由动词介导的视觉事件信息能够在线上实现早期消解歧义，这一点通过对适当的施事/受事角色填充项的预期眼动得到了证明。在研究语调的影响时，我们重复了这一发现。实验3表明，当动词位于句末因而无法对所描绘的事件建立早期指称时，仅靠语言线索就能在人们遇到动词之前实现歧义消解。我们的研究结果揭示了所描绘的事件对增量题元角色分配以及局部结构和角色歧义消解的在线影响。因此，我们的研究结果需要一种指称概念，除了实体之外还包括动作和事件（例如《语义学与认知》，1983年），并支持一种利用丰富语义范畴库的在线句子理解理论。
