How do people interpret implausible sentences?

Cai, Zhenguang G.; Zhao, Nan; Pickering, Martin J.

doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2022.105101

Cited by 15 publications

(53 citation statements)

References 56 publications

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“…Christianson et al (2010) found that message plausibility affected syntactic priming effects, but they found no evidence that listeners' interpretations of the sentence modulated this effect. In contrast, the present study and Cai et al (2022) found evidence for plausibility-driven priming being modulated by listeners'…”

Section: Discussioncontrasting

confidence: 99%

“…Although potentially an interesting account, this is not consistent with a relationship between noisy channel interpretations and noisy channel parses. 2 The present experiment expands on this earlier work in two ways (see also Cai et al, 2022;discussed below). First, we assessed interpretations after assessing syntactic priming to avoid potentially influencing priming with an intervening question about message interpretation.…”

mentioning

confidence: 69%

“…Recently, Cai et al (2022) offered an alternate explanation for a similar finding based on listeners' predictions as the sentence unfolds. According to their proposal, alternate syntactic structures might be primed because the listener predicted the sentence would unfold that way at PLAUSIBILITY AND PRIMING an earlier point in the sentence.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…When this prediction results in a parse being activated strongly enough, this results in a change in interpretation, however, a prediction might sometimes activate a parse enough to influence priming, but not enough to result in a switch in interpretation. Cai et al (2022) present this prediction proposal as an alternative to a noisychannel account. More specifically, they claim that for the prediction account the crucial piece of information is plausibility before the final argument of the sentence has been encountered, whereas for the noisy-channel account it is plausibility at the end of the sentence.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…There is some evidence suggesting that syntactic priming can be influenced by the plausibility of a prime sentence rather than only by the veridical syntactic structure of the input (Cai, Zhao, & Pickering, 2022;Christanson, Luke, & Ferreira, 2010). The first experiment of this sort from Christianson et al (2010) assessed priming from plausible and implausible transitive sentences and found reversed priming effects from implausible sentences.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Integration of input and expectations influences syntactic parses, not just sentence interpretation

Buxó-Lugo¹,

Slevc

2022

Preprint

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Interpreting a sentence can be characterized as a rational process in which comprehenders integrate linguistic input with top-down knowledge (e.g., plausibility). One type of evidence for this is that comprehenders sometimes reinterpret sentences to arrive at interpretations that conflict with the original language input (e.g., Ferreira, 2003; Gibson et al., 2013). Does this reflect a reinterpretation of only the message, or also of earlier stages of linguistic representation such as the syntactic parse? The present study relies both on comprehension questions as a measure of the eventual interpretation (as in past work) and on syntactic priming as an implicit measure of the eventual parse of a sentence. Plausible dative sentences yielded a classic syntactic priming effect. Implausible dative sentences, for which a plausible alternative version corresponded to the alternate dative structure, not only tended to be interpreted as the plausible alternative, but also showed no priming effect from the perceived syntactic structure. These results suggest that the plausibility of a message can not only impact the interpretation of a perceived sentence, but also its underlying syntactic representation.

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Section: Discussioncontrasting

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 69%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Integration of input and expectations influences syntactic parses, not just sentence interpretation

Buxó-Lugo¹,

Slevc

2022

Preprint

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Literalism in Autistic People: a Predictive Processing Proposal

Vicente,

Michel,

Petrolini

2023

Rev.Phil.Psych.

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Autistic individuals are commonly said – and also consider themselves – to be excessively literalist, in the sense that they tend to prefer literal interpretations of words and utterances. This literalist bias seems to be fairly specific to autism and still lacks a convincing explanation. In this paper we explore a novel hypothesis that has the potential to account for the literalist bias in autism. We argue that literalism results from an atypical functioning of the predictive system: specifically, an atypical balance between predictions and error signals in language processing may make individuals more uncertain about their own predictions. Such uncertainty is then often resolved by resorting to the safest interpretation, that is, the literal one. We start by reviewing existing explanations of other autistic traits that appeal to predictive processing. We then apply these insights to language, by showing that predictions play a key role in everyday comprehension and that a low level of confidence in one’s own predictions is likely to escalate comprehension difficulties. Finally, we take a deeper look at non-literal uses of language by discussing the case of metaphors, to illustrate how a predictive processing account offers a promising explanation of the literalist bias in autism.

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What's an error anyway? Speaker- and listener-centered approaches to studying language errors

Brehm¹

2023

Psychology of Learning and Motivation

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How do people interpret implausible sentences?

Cited by 15 publications

References 56 publications

Integration of input and expectations influences syntactic parses, not just sentence interpretation

Integration of input and expectations influences syntactic parses, not just sentence interpretation

Literalism in Autistic People: a Predictive Processing Proposal

What's an error anyway? Speaker- and listener-centered approaches to studying language errors

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