Collaborative Research: LangDiv: The relationship between information structure and syntax

About This Grant

This project examines how people understand and organize information when they speak, especially how sentence structure changes to highlight either shared knowledge or new information in conversation. While past research has focused on languages with fixed word order, this study looks at languages where the grammar of sentences (especially word order) is much more dependent on conversational context and other information. It also examines how grammar, word meanings, and context work together and are understood by the brain. By including languages with different types of grammars, the project advances psycholinguistic research to better reflect how people learn and use language in real life, and how they process information in conversation. The methodology relies on the collection of cognitive data, including eye gaze data that measures where people look while listening to, speaking, and reading in their language. The data test how conversational context can make sentences easier, or harder, to process. Findings regarding how cognitive factors interact with real-world knowledge support the development of better artificial intelligence (AI) models, including large language models that are less efficient at incorporating contextual information. Other benefits to society include advances in biotechnology through use-based application of neuroscience technologies and improved AI translation software that more seamlessly relates information between languages. This project investigates the interface between syntax and information structure, focusing on how given information, new information, and emphasized information are variably cued by the grammar of a language and, in turn, variably processed in the brain. Specifically, the project compares languages that are configurational (conveying information with specific words or intonation within a relatively fixed syntactic order) with those that are less-configurational (conveying information with variable syntactic order and changes to morphology). The proposed study addresses two key research questions (1) what psycholinguistic reflexes are associated with marking focus (new/emphasized information) in typologically distinct languages, and (2) how information structure governs syntactic production, particularly in languages with less-configurational grammar. The study targets languages with discourse-sensitive syntax to broaden empirical coverage. Through experimental approaches and robust statistical modeling of eye gaze data, the project determines cross-linguistic patterns in information structure processing and production, contributing to theoretical models of the morphosyntax-discourse interface. Additionally, the project adapts psycholinguistic methodologies to ecological factors, and directly probes the ways that language is sensitive to the context in which it is used. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.