Department of Psychology, 1202 W. Johnson St., University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI 53706, USA.
Mem Cognit. 2009 Dec;37(8):1177-86. doi: 10.3758/MC.37.8.1177.
A key assumption in language comprehension is that biases in behavioral data, such as the tendency to interpret John said that Mary left yesterday to mean that yesterday modifies the syntactically local verb left, not the distant verb said, reflect inherent biases in the language comprehension system. In the present article, an alternative production-distribution-comprehension (PDC) account is pursued; this account states that comprehension biases emerge from different interpretation frequencies in the language, which themselves emerge from pressures on the language production system to produce some structures more than others. In two corpus analyses and two self-paced reading experiments, we investigated these claims for verb modification ambiguities, for which phrase length is hypothesized to shape production. The results support claims that tendencies to produce short phrases before long ones create distributional regularities for modification ambiguities in the language and that learning over these regularities shapes comprehenders' interpretations of modification ambiguities. Implications for the PDC and other accounts are discussed.
语言理解中的一个关键假设是，行为数据中的偏差，例如将 John said that Mary left yesterday 解释为 yesterday 修饰句法上的本地动词 left，而不是远处的动词 said，反映了语言理解系统固有的偏差。在本文中，提出了一种替代的产生-分布-理解（PDC）理论；该理论指出，理解偏差源于语言中不同的解释频率，而这些频率本身源于语言产生系统的压力，需要产生某些结构而不是其他结构。在两项语料库分析和两项眼动实验中，我们研究了这些关于动词修饰歧义的说法，其中假设短语长度会影响产生。结果支持了以下说法，即在产生长短语之前先产生短短语的倾向为语言中的修饰歧义创造了分布规律，并且通过这些规律进行学习会影响理解者对修饰歧义的解释。讨论了 PDC 和其他理论的含义。
