Department of Psychology, University of York, UK.
Cogn Psychol. 2012 Sep;65(2):141-76. doi: 10.1016/j.cogpsych.2012.03.002. Epub 2012 Apr 24.
This work investigates production preferences in different languages. Specifically, it examines how animacy, competition processes, and language-specific constraints shape speakers' choices of structure. English, Spanish and Serbian speakers were presented with depicted events in which either an animate or inanimate entity was acted upon by an agent. Questions about the affected participant in these events prompted the production of relative clauses identifying these entities (e.g., the bag the woman is punching). Results indicated that in English, animacy plays a strong role in determining the choice of passive structures. In contrast, it plays a less prominent role in Spanish and Serbian structure choices, where more active structures were produced to varying degrees. Critically, the semantic similarity between the agent and the patient of the event correlated with the omission of the agent in all languages, indicating that competition resulted in the agent's inhibition. Similarity also correlated with different functional choices in Spanish. The results suggest that similarity-based competition may influence various stages of production planning but its manifestations are constrained by language-specific grammatical options. Implications for models of sentence production and the relationship between production and comprehension are discussed.
这项工作研究了不同语言中的生产偏好。具体来说，它考察了生物性、竞争过程以及语言特定的限制如何影响说话者对结构的选择。研究向英语、西班牙语和塞尔维亚语的使用者展示了描述性的事件，其中一个有生命或无生命的实体被一个主体所作用。关于这些事件中受影响的参与者的问题促使人们生成了关系从句来识别这些实体（例如，女人正在打的包）。结果表明，在英语中，生物性在决定被动结构的选择方面起着重要作用。相比之下，在西班牙语和塞尔维亚语的结构选择中，生物性的作用不那么突出，在这两种语言中，产生了不同程度的更主动的结构。关键的是，事件的主体和客体之间的语义相似性与所有语言中主体的省略相关，这表明竞争导致了主体的抑制。相似性也与西班牙语中的不同功能选择相关。结果表明，基于相似性的竞争可能会影响生产计划的各个阶段，但它的表现受到语言特定语法选项的限制。讨论了对句子生成模型和生产与理解之间关系的影响。
