Department of Psychology and Beckman Institute, University of Illinois, Urbana, IL 61801, USA.
Psychol Sci. 2011 Dec;22(12):1574-82. doi: 10.1177/0956797611418245. Epub 2011 Nov 28.
Communication is aided greatly when speakers and listeners take advantage of mutually shared knowledge (i.e., common ground). How such information is represented in memory is not well known. Using a neuropsychological-psycholinguistic approach to real-time language understanding, we investigated the ability to form and use common ground during conversation in memory-impaired participants with hippocampal amnesia. Analyses of amnesics' eye fixations as they interpreted their partner's utterances about a set of objects demonstrated successful use of common ground when the amnesics had immediate access to common-ground information, but dramatic failures when they did not. These findings indicate a clear role for declarative memory in maintenance of common-ground representations. Even when amnesics were successful, however, the eye movement record revealed subtle deficits in resolving potential ambiguity among competing intended referents; this finding suggests that declarative memory may be critical to more basic aspects of the on-line resolution of linguistic ambiguity.
当说话者和听话者利用相互共享的知识（即共同基础）时，沟通会得到极大的帮助。但人们对这种信息在记忆中是如何表示的知之甚少。通过采用神经心理学-心理语言学方法对实时语言理解进行研究，我们调查了记忆受损的伴有海马体遗忘症的参与者在对话中形成和使用共同基础的能力。对遗忘症者在解释其伙伴关于一组对象的话语时的眼动注视的分析表明，当遗忘症者可以立即获得共同基础信息时，他们成功地使用了共同基础，但当他们无法获得共同基础信息时，则出现了明显的失败。这些发现表明，陈述性记忆在维持共同基础表示方面起着明确的作用。然而，即使遗忘症者成功了，眼动记录也显示出在解决潜在的竞争意图指代之间的歧义方面存在细微的缺陷；这一发现表明，陈述性记忆对于在线解决语言歧义的更基本方面可能至关重要。
