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Related Experiment Video

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Examining Online Syntactic Processing of Spoken Complex Sentences in Chinese Using Dual-Modal Interference Tasks

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When language comprehension goes wrong for the right reasons: Good-enough, underspecified, or shallow language

Kiel Christianson¹

¹a Department of Educational Psychology , University of Illinois, College of Education , Champaign , IL , USA.

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology (2006)

|January 20, 2016

Summary

Human language processing often uses "good enough" strategies, leading to miscommunication. This shallow processing is a preference of our cognitive system, not random error.

Keywords:

Good-enough language processing Language comprehension Psycholinguistics Shallow language processing Underspecified language processing

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Area of Science:

Psycholinguistics
Cognitive Science
Human Language Processing

Background:

Reviews the concept of

Purpose of the Study:

To provide an overview of shallow language processing.
To explore the cognitive underpinnings of communication errors.

Main Methods:

Literature review of psycholinguistic studies.
Conceptual analysis of cognitive processing models.
Introduction to nine related research papers.

Main Results:

A significant portion of miscommunication stems from the human language system's preference for "good enough" processing.
This shallow processing is a fast, frugal, and less effortful cognitive strategy.

Conclusions:

The architecture of human language processing favors certain errors for efficiency.
Understanding these processing preferences is key to explaining communication failures.