Moses beats Adam: A semantic relatedness effect on a semantic illusion

Oostendorp, Herre van; Mul, Sjaak De

doi:10.1016/0001-6918(90)90033-c

Cited by 63 publications

(44 citation statements)

References 11 publications

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“…By definition, learners' errors share close semantic overlap with the correct information, which likely makes these errors particularly difficult to notice. The literature on semantic illusions supports the same point: Learners are surprisingly willing to provide meaningful answers to nonsensical questions such as How many animals of each kind did Moses take on the ark?, as long as the errorful term (Moses) shares a close semantic overlap with the correct answer (Noah; Erickson & Mattson, 1981;van Oostendorp & de Mul, 1990).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Correcting false memories: Errors must be noticed and replaced

Mullet

Marsh

2015

Mem Cogn

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Correcting false memories: Errors must be noticed and replaced

Mullet

Marsh

2015

Mem Cogn

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“…(Erikson and Matteson, 1981). The probability of a semantic illusion is affected by a number of factors, such as word similarity (Van Oostendorp and De Mul, 1990;Shafto and Mackay, 2000), processing difficulty (Barton and Sanford, 1996), surrounding context (Hannon and Daneman, 2001) and syntactic form (Büttner, 2007). The semantic illusion reflects the depth of semantic processing, and can be modulated by allocation of attention (for reviews see Sanford, 2002;Sanford and Sturt, 2002).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Semantic illusion depends on information structure: ERP evidence

2009

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Next to propositional content, speakers distribute information in their utterances in such a way that listeners can make a distinction between new (focused) and given (non-focused) information. This is referred to as information structure. We measured event-related potentials (ERPs) to explore the role of information structure in semantic processing.Following different questions in wh-question-answer pairs (e.g. What kind of vegetable did Ming buy for cooking today? / Who bought the vegetables for cooking today?), the answer sentences (e.g., Ming bought eggplant/beef to cook today.) contained a critical word, which was either semantically appropriate (eggplant) or inappropriate (beef), and either focus or non-focus.The results showed a full N400 effect only when the critical words were in focus position. In non-focus position a strongly reduced N400 effect was observed, in line with the well-known semantic illusion effect. The results suggest that information structure facilitates semantic processing by devoting more resources to focused information. IntroductionWhen people communicate what they believe to be new or important, most of them do not realize that they arrange the information in a highly structured manner. For example, in the conversation What did you eat for dinner? / I ate beef for dinner, the wh-phrase in the question indicates what information the requester expects. In the answer, the beef is a newly supplied information, which is the focus of the sentence, whereas the remaining part of the sentence is associated with the previous context, which is the common background shared by the speaker and listener. This way of connecting new information (focus) with previously given information (background) during communication is part of information structure (IS) (Jackendoff, 2002). As described in the example, IS usually consists of two elements: background and focus. Background refers to the information that is already available in the mind of the listener/reader, while focus refers to the part of utterance that represents the new or contrastive information (Gűnther et al., 1999). There are several approaches to realize IS, such as position in question-answer pairs (as in the example, focus is in bold), syntactic constructions like it-cleft sentence (It is beef that I ate for dinner.), and accentuation in spoken language (I ate BEEF for dinner. The accented word is marked in capitals). Several behavioral studies suggest that the focused information receives more attention and attains deeper processing than non-focused information (Cutler and Fodor, 1979;Birch and Rayner, 1997;Ward and Sturt, 2007;Sanford et al., 2006). In a recent ERP study, Li et al. (2008a) found that more resources

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“…One important factor is the similarity between the correct term and the distorted or illusion term (Erickson & Mattson, 1981;van Oostendorp & de Mul, 1990;van Oostendorp & Kok, 1990). Subjects are less likely to fall for the illusion when the distorted term is less similar to the correct term.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In the third account, proposed by Barton and Sanford (1993;Sanford & Garrod, 1994; see also van Oostendorp & de Mul, 1990 for a very similar model), the detection of the semantic illusion depends on an initial global fit between the concepts making up the sentence. When the global fit between the concepts is close, a more detailed and strenuous semantic analysis will not be carried out and distorted terms are likely to be missed.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The detection of semantic illusions: Task-specific effects for similarity and position of distorted terms

1997

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The effect of task demands on the detection of semantic illusions was investigated. In Exp. 1, subjects were given a detection task with different instructions for accuracy. Less illusions occurred under instructions that stressed accuracy, indicating strategic control of detection rates. In Exp. 2, sentences with dissimilar distorted terms resulted in shorter latencies than sentences with similar distorted terms in a detection task, but in longer response times in a question-answering task. In Exp. 3, the similarity effect was found to vary with the position of the distorted term in combination with task demands. In a verification task, the similarity effect did not differ for the beginning or the end of sentences. In a question-answering task, a significant similarity effect was observed only for distorted terms at the beginning of sentences. We argue that the results indicate minimal depth of semantic processing with respect to different task requirements. Implications for different theoretical accounts of semantic illusions are discussed.

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Moses beats Adam: A semantic relatedness effect on a semantic illusion

Cited by 63 publications

References 11 publications

Correcting false memories: Errors must be noticed and replaced

Correcting false memories: Errors must be noticed and replaced

Semantic illusion depends on information structure: ERP evidence

The detection of semantic illusions: Task-specific effects for similarity and position of distorted terms

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