Speaker-specific processing of anomalous utterances.

Area of Science:

• Psycholinguistics
• Cognitive Science
• Linguistics

Background:

• Readers often interpret grammatical errors and sentence blends non-literally.
• They infer that a more frequent or canonical utterance was intended.

Purpose of the Study:

• Examine how interlocutor identity affects processing and interpretation of anomalous sentences.
• Investigate the influence of speaker characteristics on sentence comprehension.

Main Methods:

• Self-paced reading paradigm presenting anomalous sentences in "emails" attributed to various writers.
• Comprehension questions probed sentence interpretation based on item and speaker properties.
• Compared standardized American English speakers to L2 English speakers and non-Standardized American English dialect speakers.

Main Results:

• Agreement errors and "without-blends" led to more non-literal responses than canonical items.
• Agreement errors prompted more non-literal interpretations when attributed to standardized American English speakers compared to non-Standardized groups.
• Speaker identity significantly modulated sentence interpretation.

Conclusions:

• Sentence comprehension relies on expectations and heuristics about likely utterances.
• These expectations are shaped by language experience, speaker-specific differences, and cognitive biases.
• Interlocutor identity is a crucial factor in processing and interpreting linguistic anomalies.