Department of Psychology, University of Maryland, Park, MD 20742, USA.
J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn. 2013 May;39(3):985-92. doi: 10.1037/a0029525. Epub 2012 Jul 30.
Natural language contains disfluencies and errors. Do listeners simply discard information that was clearly produced in error, or can erroneous material persist to affect subsequent processing? Two experiments explored this question using a structural priming paradigm. Speakers described dative-eliciting pictures after hearing prime sentences that either were disfluent but with a consistent dative structure or were sentences that began as datives but were corrected to transitives (e.g., The mechanic is giving the new part… uh… is recognizing the new part). If an erroneous and corrected sentence fragment is discarded, then the original form of an ultimately transitive utterance should not influence future production. However, if the syntactic parse of an error is not discarded, then it should influence speakers' subsequent choice of syntactic structure. In both experiments, structural priming was significantly reduced when primes were corrected to a non-dative structure (relative to disfluent but ultimately dative primes). However, target descriptions did show an influence from corrected errors when the prime and target shared the same verb. Thus, a parse mapping a verb to a specific argument structure can persist despite being explicitly marked as an error, reflecting the incremental and predictive nature of comprehension.
自然语言中存在不流畅和错误。听众是否会简单地丢弃明显错误的信息，或者错误的信息是否会持续存在，从而影响后续的处理？两个实验使用结构启动范式探讨了这个问题。说话人在听到启动句后描述与格诱发图片，这些启动句要么不流畅但具有一致的与格结构，要么是起始为与格但被纠正为及物结构的句子（例如，机械师正在给新零件……呃……正在识别新零件）。如果错误和纠正的句子片段被丢弃，那么最终及物结构的原始形式不应影响未来的生成。然而，如果错误的句法分析没有被丢弃，那么它应该影响说话人随后对句法结构的选择。在两个实验中，当启动句被纠正为非与格结构时，结构启动显著减少（相对于不流畅但最终是与格的启动句）。然而，当启动句和目标句共享相同的动词时，目标描述确实表现出了来自纠正错误的影响。因此，尽管动词被明确标记为错误，但映射动词到特定论元结构的分析可以持续存在，反映了理解的增量和预测性质。
