Effects of plausibility on structural priming.

Abstract

We report a replication and extension of Ferreira (2003), in which it was observed that native adult English speakers misinterpret passive sentences that relate implausible but not impossible semantic relationships (e.g., The angler was caught by the fish) significantly more often than they do plausible passives or plausible or implausible active sentences. In the experiment reported here, participants listened to the same plausible and implausible passive and active sentences as in Ferreira (2003), answered comprehension questions, and then orally described line drawings of simple transitive actions. The descriptions were analyzed as a measure of structural priming (Bock, 1986). Question accuracy data replicated Ferreira (2003). Production data yielded an interaction: Passive descriptions were produced more often after plausible passives and implausible actives. We interpret these results as indicative of a language processor that proceeds along differentiated morphosyntactic and semantic routes. The processor may end up adjudicating between conflicting outputs from these routes by settling on a "good enough" representation that is not completely faithful to the input.

Trends in syntactic parsing: anticipation, Bayesian estimation, and good-enough parsing

“…These results suggest that comprehenders do not underspecify syntactic form, but that plausible semantic interpretations derived early in a sentence are not always displaced based on later processing events [74][75][76]. Hence, while comprehenders may favor sensible interpretations over less sensible ones (based on general world knowledge or contextually supplied information), this does not mean that syntactic structures are not computed or do not contribute to sentence interpretations.…”

I “hear” what you're “saying”: Auditory perceptual simulation, reading speed, and reading comprehension

“…Object-relative clauses were read more slowly than subject-relative clauses (e.g., Gibson, 1998;Traxler et al, 2002). Implausible sentences yielded longer reading times and lower accuracy than plausible ones (Christianson et al, 2010;Ferreira, 2003;Lim & Christianson, 2013b), with implausible ORCs the most likely to be misinterpreted. Experiments 2 and 3 investigated APS effects during silent reading, using different methods to encourage readers to perform APS: photos of "speakers" in Experiment 2; recordings of "speakers" saying their names in Experiment 3.…”

Lingering misinterpretations of garden path sentences arise from competing syntactic representations

“…The data from our previous experiment indicate that the correct syntactic structure is built quickly during reanalysis, but those findings are compatible with a lingering of the initial, incorrect syntactic structure. Given that Sachs (1967) demonstrated the relative speedy decay of syntactic structure, and Christianson, Luke, and Ferreira (2010) reported semantic effects on structural priming, it seems reasonable to posit that semantic representations should linger longer than syntactic structures (see also Fodor, Bever, & Garrett, 1974). Nonetheless, it does appear that some aspects of the initial syntactic structure persist beyond the point at which that structure is still viable.…”