话语参照语境条件下汉语歧义短语的加工

THE PROCESSING OF AMBIGUOUS PHRASES IN REFERENTIAL DISCOURSE CONTEXT IN CHINESE

采用移动窗口和眼动记录两种范式 ,以符合“VP +N1+的 +N2”格式的均衡型和述宾型两类汉语歧义短语为背景 ,在两个实验中 ,考察了话语参照语境影响歧义短语句法分析的机制以及时间进程。结果发现 ,在早于解歧区 1的区段上就开始出现话语语境效应。这些发现表明话语参照语境可以通过概念期望机制起作用 ,而并非仅仅通过参照前提机制起作用。此外 ,实验还证明了话语参照语境在句子加工早期的作用。这一结果为句法歧义消解的参照理论和基于制约的模型提供了证据 ,而对宣称最初的句法分析独立于话语语境的花园路径模型 。

In Chinese language, there are some phrases, which are orderly composed of one verb (VP), one noun (N1), one auxiliary, and another noun (N2). They are temporarily ambiguous between modifier-noun construction (MNC) and narrative-object structure (NOS). Some of them are balanced between MNC and NOS (named Balanced Phrases). The others bias towards either MNC (named MNC-biased Phrases) or NOS (named NOS-biased Phrases). Both balanced and NOS-biased phrases were used to investigate the mechanisms underlying the effect of referential discourse context on the parsing of these ambiguous phrases. Twenty undergraduate students participated in Experiment 1, they were asked to read short passages word-by-word as quickly as possible, without sacrificing their comprehension of each passage. Another sixteen undergraduate students participated in Experiment 2, where their eye movements were recorded when they read the same passages. It was found that the referential discourse context, in both experiments, had its influenced on the parsing of the ambiguous phrases even at the very beginning of these phrases. These results indicate that the specific mechanism that drives the contextual influence may not be attributable solely to referential presuppositions. In other words, informational or conceptual expectations can be, at least partly, responsible for the referential contextual effects observed. In addition, very early influence of discourse context was found in Experiment 2, which was not predicted by garden-path models that suppose initial parsing decision is context-independent.