中文的語句理解歷程：從實徵行為與模擬研究探討句法及語意線索之角色
Date Issued
2004
Date
2004
Author(s)
羅明
DOI
zh-TW
Abstract
In Chinese, a noun is not singular, nor plural, and a verb has no tense or person. Although Chinese is an isolating language, word order is not a strict cue to sentence meaning. The utilities of word order, syntactic markers and other linguistic devices in sentence comprehension have been tested, and the generally finding was that there was a weak word order effect, which was predicted by the competition model. However, inconsistent results where subjects showed strong tendency to pick “kettle” as agent in sentence like “Kettle lick pig” were reported in a number of research, and discounted because the subjects were Chinese and English bilinguals. The word order preference was said a transferring effect from English.
In two experiments and one simulation, the role of word order, lexical semantics, and syntactic markers in interpreting simple Chinese sentences (consisting of two nouns and a verb) was tested. Experiment 1 found that college students who had learnt English for at least 7 years tended to choose the first noun as subject when the word order of a stimulus sentence was in canonical form, i.e., NVN, irrespective to its semantic properties. However, for non-canonical sentences, the participants based their interpretations on lexical rather than syntactic cues. The same result pattern was obtained in Experiment 2 when third grade elementary students who did not speak English were tested. A back-propagated network was trained to fit the behavioral data obtained in the present and previous studies. The syntactic and semantic features of a sentence were represented in inputs, and the output was set equal to the probability the first noun was chosen as agent. Analysis of the link weights between input and hidden nodes revealed that lexical semantics had more influence than word order on the net’s performance. However, analysis of the stimuli represented in the trained net showed that different types of sentences were processed differently. The internal activation of the hidden nodes exhibited different patterns for canonical and non-canonical sentences. Word order was important to comprehend canonical sentences, and lexical semantics were important for non-canonical ones.
These results which indicated that Chinese speakers relying on different cues to interpret different types of sentences were not predicted by the competition model, but were in agreement with the canonical form theory proposed by Slobin and Bever.
Subjects
詞序
競爭理論
聯結論者模擬
語義
句法
competition model
syntax
connectionist
word order
semantics
Type
other