Expecting the unexpected: Examining the interplay between real-world knowledge and contextual cues during language...

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Psycholinguistics
• Language Comprehension

Background:

• Communication often involves implausible events.
• Prior research focused on explicit cues for real-world knowledge violations.
• The interaction between real-world and contextual knowledge in unconstrained contexts (like dreams) is under-explored.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate how real-world knowledge and context interact during language comprehension.
• To determine if unconstrained contexts can bias expectations towards implausible information.
• To explore the comprehension difficulties associated with plausible versus implausible information in dream scenarios.

Main Methods:

• Experiment 1: Sentence completion task to assess expectations.
• Experiment 2: Self-paced reading task to measure reading times and comprehension.
• Utilized dream scenarios as a relatively unconstraining context.

Main Results:

• Dream contexts generally guided expectations towards less plausible information.
• Real-world knowledge remained a significant constraint on expectations.
• Plausible information led to greater comprehension difficulties than implausible information in later sentence regions.

Conclusions:

• Context can guide comprehenders to expect world knowledge violations without explicit constraints.
• This effect is driven by increased difficulty processing plausible content.
• Findings necessitate extensions to language comprehension models, considering context-driven preferences for low-probability information.