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How do people interpret implausible sentences?

Zhenguang G Cai1, Nan Zhao2, Martin J Pickering3

  • 1Department of Linguistics and Modern Languages / Brain and Mind Institute, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.

Cognition
|March 27, 2022
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

People interpret unusual sentences nonliterally by adjusting sentence structure (syntactic analysis), not just meaning (semantic interpretation). This adjustment happens early in processing, influencing how we understand complex sentences.

Keywords:
Implausible sentencesSemantic interpretationStructural primingSyntactic analysisSyntactic prediction

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Area of Science:

  • Psycholinguistics
  • Cognitive Science
  • Computational Linguistics

Background:

  • Human language comprehension often involves resolving ambiguities and implausibilities.
  • Sentences like 'The mother gave the candle the daughter' can be interpreted nonliterally, implying the daughter received the candle.
  • Two main accounts exist: nonliteral syntactic analysis versus nonliteral semantic interpretation.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate the cognitive mechanisms underlying nonliteral sentence interpretation.
  • To differentiate between syntactic and semantic processing in resolving implausible sentence structures.
  • To determine if nonliteral interpretations involve constructing alternative syntactic analyses.

Main Methods:

  • Three structural priming experiments were conducted.
  • Participants were exposed to plausible or implausible sentences with either double-object (DO) or prepositional-object (PO) structures.
  • Comprehension was assessed via questions or picture descriptions following sentence exposure.

Main Results:

  • Priming effects were reduced for implausible sentences compared to plausible ones.
  • Priming was further reduced when implausible sentences were interpreted nonliterally.
  • These findings support the role of syntactic analysis in nonliteral interpretation.

Conclusions:

  • Comprehenders actively construct nonliteral syntactic analyses to interpret implausible sentences.
  • This syntactic reanalysis is predicted and occurs early in sentence processing.
  • The findings challenge purely semantic accounts of nonliteral interpretation.