Speaker: Yuhan Zhang (Harvard)
Title: Understanding language illusions
Abstract:
What processing mechanisms are involved when encountering linguistic input that is literally unacceptable? In this talk, I will present two language illusions and provide separate accounts as to why comprehenders might accept them anyway.
The first illusion is the “comparative illusion” – “more people have been to Russia than I have.” Initially accepted by individuals, they often struggle to elaborate on its meaning. I propose a noisy-channel approach to explain initial acceptance: amidst uncertain linguistic signals during processing, comprehenders entertain plausible alternatives beyond the perceived signal. They then select the most probable one by weighing prior probabilities and the likelihood for the alternative to be encapsulated in the perceived one.
The second illusion is the “negative polarity item” illusion – “many authors that few critics recommended have ever received acknowledgment for a best-selling novel.” Compared to canonical sentences in previous literature, this sentence induces a robust illusion effect. I present a memory-based account to explain this phenomenon. The primary assertion is that the semantic similarity and locality of the quantifiers “few” and “many” increase the likelihood of a lossy mental representation of the preceding context before comprehenders reach the negative polarity item “ever.” This leads to false memory retrieval during the construction of the negative polarity dependency.
This talk delves into the intricacies of language processing, shedding light on why individuals may accept linguistically unacceptable input and offering insights into the underlying cognitive mechanisms at play.