Comparative Illusions are Evidence of Rational Inference in Language Comprehension
Yuhan Zhang, Carina Kauf, Roger Levy, Edward Gibson
January 2025 

Sometimes sentences sound acceptable when they are ungrammatical or semantically implausible. In this paper, 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, (1) we identified a linguistic construction that elicits a salient CI illusion effect; (2) we established a range of plausible interpretations of the CI sentence; and (3) 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 that interpretation is to be produced as the CI sentence during noisy language communication.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/008669 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	under review
keywords:	language illusion, language processing, psycholinguistics, information theory, rational inference, semantics, syntax
previous versions:	v1 [December 2024]
Downloaded:	468 times

 

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