There has been considerable investigation of the roles that linguistic and world knowledge play during language comprehension. This investigation is important because its results have ramifications for both basic questions about how the mature intact language comprehension system functions and for applied questions regarding how comprehension systems that are impaired by aphasia might function. In the current paper, we review debates and research related to the representation and use of linguistic and world knowledge in language comprehension and then describe a recent computational model that takes both world and linguistic knowledge into account in predicting language comprehension difficulty. We then review empirical work that attempts to characterize the interactions and potential trade‐offs between world and linguistic knowledge during language comprehension, and relate this work to the computational model previously described. We conclude with a brief overview of a few open questions regarding the representation of linguistic and world knowledge.

中文翻译：

---

语言和世界知识在语言处理中的使用

对于语言和世界知识在语言理解过程中所扮演的角色，已经进行了大量研究。这项研究很重要，因为它的结果对关于完整的成熟语言理解系统如何运作的基本问题以及关于失语症损害的理解系统如何运作的应用问题都有影响。在本文中，我们回顾了与语言理解和语言知识在语言理解中的表示和使用有关的辩论和研究，然后描述了一种新的计算模型，该模型在预测语言理解难度时考虑了世界知识和语言知识。然后，我们回顾了一些经验工作，这些工作试图描述语言理解过程中世界与语言知识之间的相互作用和潜在的取舍，并将该工作与先前描述的计算模型相关联。最后，我们简要概述了有关语言和世界知识表示的几个开放性问题。