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Rational language comprehension depends on priors about both meaning and structure
Moshe Poliak1, Saima Malik-Moraleda1, Edward Gibson1
1Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Summary
Language comprehension uses structural expectations. Even in languages with flexible word order like Hindi and Russian, rare sentence structures are interpreted nonliterally, suggesting a universal cognitive strategy.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Science
- Psycholinguistics
- Linguistics
Background:
- Language comprehension integrates perceived speech with prior expectations.
- Previous research on structural priors focused on analytic languages (e.g., English).
- This raises questions about the universality of structural priors in language processing.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the universality of the structural prior over word order.
- To examine if this prior influences sentence interpretation in synthetic, flexible-word-order languages.
Main Methods:
- Conducted two studies in Hindi and three in Russian using translated materials.
- Manipulated structural frequency by comparing canonical and noncanonical word orders.
- Assessed sentence interpretation based on plausibility and structural frequency.
Main Results:
- Noncanonical sentences were interpreted nonliterally more often than canonical sentences.
- This effect persisted despite the flexible word order of Hindi and Russian.
- Findings suggest the structural prior is consistently evaluated.
Conclusions:
- The structural prior over word order is a universal component of language processing.
- This cognitive strategy is employed regardless of a language's specific word order characteristics.
- Supports a general cognitive mechanism underlying sentence interpretation across diverse languages.
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