Department of Linguistics and Psychology, University of California at San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, CA 92093, USA.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2009 Dec 15;106(50):21086-90. doi: 10.1073/pnas.0907664106. Epub 2009 Nov 24.
In prevailing approaches to human sentence comprehension, the outcome of the word recognition process is assumed to be a categorical representation with no residual uncertainty. Yet perception is inevitably uncertain, and a system making optimal use of available information might retain this uncertainty and interactively recruit grammatical analysis and subsequent perceptual input to help resolve it. To test for the possibility of such an interaction, we tracked readers' eye movements as they read sentences constructed to vary in (i) whether an early word had near neighbors of a different grammatical category, and (ii) how strongly another word further downstream cohered grammatically with these potential near neighbors. Eye movements indicated that readers maintain uncertain beliefs about previously read word identities, revise these beliefs on the basis of relative grammatical consistency with subsequent input, and use these changing beliefs to guide saccadic behavior in ways consistent with principles of rational probabilistic inference.
在目前人类句子理解的研究方法中，假定单词识别过程的结果是一种没有剩余不确定性的类别表示。然而，感知不可避免地存在不确定性，如果一个系统能够充分利用可用信息，它可能会保留这种不确定性，并与语法分析和后续感知输入进行交互，以帮助解决这种不确定性。为了验证这种交互的可能性，我们跟踪了读者在阅读句子时的眼球运动，这些句子的结构可以变化（i）早期单词是否有不同语法类别的近邻，以及（ii）另一个词与这些潜在近邻的语法一致性有多强。眼球运动表明，读者对之前阅读的单词身份持有不确定的信念，根据与后续输入的相对语法一致性来修正这些信念，并利用这些不断变化的信念来引导扫视行为，这与理性概率推理的原则一致。
