Comparative illusions are evidence of rational inference in language comprehension.

IF 3.5 1区 心理学 Q1 PSYCHOLOGY, EXPERIMENTAL
Yuhan Zhang,Carina Kauf,Roger P Levy,Edward Gibson
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引用次数: 0

Abstract

Sometimes sentences sound acceptable when they are ungrammatical or semantically implausible. In this article, we study "comparative illusion" (CI) sentences where people often rate a sentence like More people have been to Russia than I have to be acceptable while in fact it is semantically anomalous. We provide a potential explanation for this language illusion from the noisy-channel framework. We hypothesize that comprehenders make rational inferences over the perceived sentence by entertaining alternative "close" plausible interpretations, where closeness is determined by possible production errors. In four experiments, (a) we identified a linguistic construction that elicits a salient CI illusion effect, (b) we established a range of plausible interpretations of the CI sentence, and (c) we found that the probability for comprehenders to assign a certain plausible interpretation to the CI sentence is proportional to how likely they think that interpretation is to be produced as the CI sentence during noisy language communication. This work contributes to a growing body of literature supporting rational noisy-channel inference during language comprehension. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).
比较错觉是语言理解中理性推理的证据。
有时候句子在语法或语义上不合理时听起来还是可以接受的。在这篇文章中,我们研究了“比较错觉”(CI)句子,人们通常认为一个句子像“去过俄罗斯的人比我多”这样的句子是可以接受的,而实际上它在语义上是异常的。我们从噪声通道框架为这种语言错觉提供了一种潜在的解释。我们假设,理解者通过接受其他“接近”似是而非的解释,对感知到的句子做出理性推断,其中接近程度由可能的生产错误决定。在四个实验中,(a)我们确定了一个引起显著CI错觉效应的语言结构,(b)我们建立了一系列对CI句子的合理解释,(c)我们发现理解者为CI句子分配某种合理解释的概率与他们认为在嘈杂的语言交流中产生CI句子的可能性成正比。这项工作有助于越来越多的文献支持在语言理解过程中合理的噪声信道推理。(PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA,版权所有)。
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。
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来源期刊
CiteScore
6.20
自引率
4.90%
发文量
300
期刊介绍: The Journal of Experimental Psychology: General publishes articles describing empirical work that bridges the traditional interests of two or more communities of psychology. The work may touch on issues dealt with in JEP: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, JEP: Human Perception and Performance, JEP: Animal Behavior Processes, or JEP: Applied, but may also concern issues in other subdisciplines of psychology, including social processes, developmental processes, psychopathology, neuroscience, or computational modeling. Articles in JEP: General may be longer than the usual journal publication if necessary, but shorter articles that bridge subdisciplines will also be considered.
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