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Updated: Nov 28, 2025

Examining Online Syntactic Processing of Spoken Complex Sentences in Chinese Using Dual-Modal Interference Tasks
Published on: September 5, 2019
Noisy is better than rare: Comprehenders compromise subject-verb agreement to form more probable linguistic
Maayan Keshev1, Aya Meltzer-Asscher2
1Linguistics Department, Tel-Aviv University, Tel-Aviv, Israel.
Abstract:
Production and perception errors are common in everyday language use. Recent studies suggest that in order to overcome the flawed speech signal, comprehenders engage in rational noisy-channel processing, which can pull their interpretation towards more probable "near-neighbor" analyses, based on the assumption that an error may have occurred in the transmission of the sentence. We investigate this type of processing using subject/object relative clause ambiguity in Hebrew. In four self-paced reading experiments and a sentence completion experiment, we find that during online processing, readers apply elaborate knowledge regarding the distribution of structures in the language, and that they are willing to compromise subject-verb agreement to refrain from (grammatical but) highly improbable structures. The results suggest that the prior probability of alternative analyses modulates the interpretation of agreement.
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