外国语言文化论坛（第八十九讲)讲座二:Situating context in inferential language processing
讲座名称：
外国语言文化论坛（第八十九讲)讲座二:Situating context in inferential language processing
讲座时间：
2016-12-20
讲座人：
蔡振光
形式：
校区：
兴庆校区
实践学分：
讲座内容：
外国语言文化论坛（第八十九讲)
讲 座二：Situating context in inferential language processing
时 间：2016年12月20日（周二）下午4：00-6：00
地 点：地 点：逸夫外文楼B座10楼学术报告厅
主讲人：蔡振光博士
摘 要：Language is used in context: we comprehend words within sentences, sentences within discourse, and discourse among interlocutors and in a particular setting. While much research has highlighted the role of context in language processing (e.g., the meaning of a word is largely determined by the prior and subsequent context), what roles different contexts (e.g., prior, concurrent, and subsequent context) play in the cognitive processes of language is relatively unexplored. In this talk, the lecturer proposes to situate context in the framework of inferential language processing, according to which comprehenders actively engage their prior knowledge to make inferences about incoming input (e.g., what words are likely to come). He will categorise context into prior, concurrent, and subsequent context and argue that they have different functions in language processing. Crouched in terms of Bayesian inference (i.e., people make inferences about an event based on both the event and their prior knowledge), he proposes that prior context serves as the prior and sets up the stage for incoming linguistic input, concurrent context constrains the clarity/certainty of the perceived linguistic input (the evidence), and subsequent context updates inferences and prior knowledge. Such a proposal provides a unified conceptualisation for investigating how different types of contextual information modulate the way people understand language.The lecturer will then present some experiments which show that comprehenders make inferences about the speaker and use that “speaker model” to interpret the speech from that speaker. In particular, he will show that comprehenders infer the dialectic identity of the speaker from his/her accent and use such the dialectic identity (e.g., American English speaker) and their distributional knowledge about that dialect (e.g., what the most likely meaning a word has in that dialect) to infer intended meaning of a word (e.g., whether the word “bonnet” means a car-part or a hat).
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