The misinterpretation of noncanonical sentences revisited.

Abstract

Most current models of sentence comprehension assume that the human parsing mechanism (HPM) algorithmically computes detailed syntactic representations as basis for extracting sentence meaning. These models share the assumption that the representations computed by the HPM accurately reflect the linguistic input. This assumption has been challenged by Ferreira (2003), who showed that comprehenders sometimes misinterpret unambiguous sentences in which subject and object appear in noncanonical order, such as passives or object-clefts. According to Ferreira, these misinterpretations show that parallel to an algorithmic analysis, the HPM performs a heuristic analysis sometimes resulting in interpretations not licensed by the grammar. Our study investigated whether misinterpretation effects indeed reflect an erroneous mapping of form to meaning due to heuristic processing strategies. Using an experimental design closely following Ferreira (2003), Experiment 1 demonstrates that errors with noncanonical sentences show up in German as well, despite the fact that German provides morphological case, which a heuristic strategy should use. Experiment 2 required participants to judge the plausibility of the same sentences. With this task, no evidence for misinterpretation of noncanonical sentences was found. Taken together, our results suggest that misinterpretation errors do not reflect errors in the mapping of form to meaning, but task-specific difficulties that arise when participants retrieve information from the memory representation of a sentence. Consequently, misinterpretation errors do not provide evidence for the claim that the HPM pursues a heuristic analysis in addition to an algorithmic analysis. Our results instead lend support to models of the HPM that assume algorithmic processing only. (PsycINFO Database Record

Can propositional biases modulate syntactic repair processes? Insights from preceding comprehension questions

“…This is contradictory to previous findings suggesting preceding contexts influence offline representations (Christianson & Luke, 2011;Grodner et al, 2005 respectively), and we suggest that the difference is telling about how task instructions influence subsequent reading of text. An alternative account of lingering misinterpretations is that they arise due to postinterpretive processes (Bader & Meng, 2018) because question accuracy does not veridically measure the quality of sentence-final interpretations but rather reveals artifacts of the memory retrieval process imposed by metalinguistic tasks. While offline tasks play an important role in psycholinguistic inquiry (see Ferreira & Yang, 2019 for an excellent review), it is true that comprehension questions may elicit artifacts derived from recalling linguistic representations.…”

Does comprehension (sometimes) go wrong for noncanonical sentences?

“…An account that emphasises postinterpretive processes as main sources of misinterpretation effects has been proposed in Bader and Meng (2018). The account is based on two experiments that investigated unambiguous noncanonical sentences in German.…”

“…To capture the differences between agent/patient naming and plausibility judgements, Bader and Meng (2018) proposed the retrieval account of misinterpretation errors . According to this account, misinterpretation errors with agent/patient naming reflect task-specific processes, in particular, the need to retrieve information from the sentence representation after some delay.…”

Modeling misretrieval and feature substitution in agreement attraction: A computational evaluation

“…Although we believe that checking participants' interpretations of agreement attraction sentences is crucial to disentangling the encoding-and retrieval-based accounts, there is a significant caveat to using comprehension questions: One cannot be certain that the given answer matches the thematic relations computed during the online processing of the sentence (see also Schlueter et al, 2019). Bader and Meng (2018) have recently argued that answers to comprehension questions may be the result of what Caplan and Waters (1999) call post-interpretive processing (see also Paolazzi, Grillo, Alexiadou, & Santi, 2019). Caplan and Waters argue that the parser generates a syntactic structure and assigns meaning to the sentence online (interpretive processing), but that afterwards additional processes come into play whose output does not always match the online interpretation.…”

“…Caplan and Waters argue that the parser generates a syntactic structure and assigns meaning to the sentence online (interpretive processing), but that afterwards additional processes come into play whose output does not always match the online interpretation. As a case in point, Bader and Meng (2018) tested implausible passive sentences such as The chef was cleaned by the pan. They found that participants often made errors when they were asked to name the agent of such sentences, but that they were highly accurate when evaluating their plausibility in a speeded task.…”