Every successful act of communication comes from the combination of the efforts of two parties: the speaker and the listener. The goal of the proposed research is to explore the division of labor between speaker and listener for the achievement of communicative success, by examining how speakers use syntactic flexibility- the ability to phrase the same idea in multiple ways -- to promote successful communication. For example, a speaker can optionally mention words like the complementizer that in sentences like The reporter heard (that) you committed a crime. Do speakers use syntactic flexibility in a comprehension-sensitive manner, choosing syntactic options that are especially easy to understand? Or do speakers instead focus on more speaker-centered pressures, creating sentences that are more quickly and efficiently produced? Accordingly, this research will investigate two kinds of factors that influence how speakers might use syntactic flexibility: comprehension-sensitive factors and speaker-centered factors. Three sets of experiments are proposed. The first two investigate possible comprehension-sensitive uses of syntactic flexibility. The first set explores whether syntactic flexibility is used to circumvent ambiguous or difficult garden path sentences or to avoid fully ambiguous sentences, under a variety of production circumstances. The second set explores whether speakers use flexibility to create preferred metrical structures, or to communicate discourse information. The final set explores the speaker-centered influences, including the kinds of retrieval difficulties that syntactic flexibility may be used to accommodate and the kinds of representations (syntactic or lexical) that underlie syntactic flexibility. These experiments, in addition to establishing how syntactic flexibility is used to achieve successful communication, will help to determine the nature of the language production mechanism that underlies normal and disordered language use, and are relevant to any field of application or research that involves the communication or transmission of information.

Agency
National Institute of Health (NIH)
Institute
National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH)
Type
Research Project (R01)
Project #
1R01MH064733-01
Application #
6417283
Study Section
Special Emphasis Panel (ZRG1-BBBP-3 (01))
Program Officer
Kurtzman, Howard S
Project Start
2001-12-01
Project End
2004-11-30
Budget Start
2001-12-01
Budget End
2002-11-30
Support Year
1
Fiscal Year
2002
Total Cost
$103,769
Indirect Cost
Name
University of California San Diego
Department
Psychology
Type
Schools of Arts and Sciences
DUNS #
077758407
City
La Jolla
State
CA
Country
United States
Zip Code
92093
Lane, Liane Wardlow; Ferreira, Victor S (2010) Abstract syntax in sentence production: Evidence from stem-exchange errors. J Mem Lang 62:151-165
Slevc, L Robert; Rosenberg, Jason C; Patel, Aniruddh D (2009) Making psycholinguistics musical: self-paced reading time evidence for shared processing of linguistic and musical syntax. Psychon Bull Rev 16:374-81
Lane, Liane Wardlow; Ferreira, Victor S (2008) Speaker-external versus speaker-internal forces on utterance form: do cognitive demands override threats to referential success? J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn 34:1466-81
Gollan, Tamar H; Brown, Alan S (2006) From tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) data to theoretical implications in two steps: when more TOTs means better retrieval. J Exp Psychol Gen 135:462-83
Slevc, L Robert; Ferreira, Victor S (2006) Halting in Single Word Production: A Test of the Perceptual Loop Theory of Speech Monitoring. J Mem Lang 54:515-540
Ferreira, Victor S; Bock, Kathryn (2006) The functions of structural priming. Lang Cogn Process 21:1011-1029
Alario, F-Xavier; Costa, Albert; Ferreira, Victor S et al. (2006) Architectures, representations and processes of language production. Lang Cogn Process 21:777-789
Lane, Liane Wardlow; Groisman, Michelle; Ferreira, Victor S (2006) Don't talk about pink elephants! Speaker's control over leaking private information during language production. Psychol Sci 17:273-7
Roland, Douglas; Elman, Jeffrey L; Ferreira, Victor S (2006) Why is that? Structural prediction and ambiguity resolution in a very large corpus of English sentences. Cognition 98:245-72
Slevc, L Robert; Miyake, Akira (2006) Individual differences in second-language proficiency: does musical ability matter? Psychol Sci 17:675-81

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