How do linguistic illusions arise? Rational inference and good-enough processing as competing latent processes within individuals

Abstract

Non-literal interpretations of implausible sentences such as "The mother gave the candle the daughter" have been taken as evidence for a rational error-correction mechanism that reconstructs the intended utterance from the ill-formed input ("... gave the daughter the candle"). However, the good-enough processing framework offers an alternative explanation: readers sometimes miss problematic aspects of sentences because they are only processing them superficially, which leads to acceptability illusions. As a synthesis of these accounts, I propose that rational inferences about errors on the one hand and good-enough processing on the other are competing latent processes that simultaneously occur within the same comprehender. In support of this view, I present data from a two-dimensional grammaticality/ interpretability judgment task with different types of subtly ill-formed sentences. Both rational inference and good-enough processing predict positive interpretability judgments for such sentences, but only good-enough processing also predicts positive grammaticality judgments. By fitting a lognormal race model jointly to judgments and response latencies, I show that rational inference and good-enough processing actively trade off with each other during reading. Furthermore, individual differences measures reveal that participant traits such as linguistic pedantry, interpretational charity, and analytic/intuitive cognitive styles contribute to variability in the processing patterns.

Comparative illusions are evidence of rational inference in language comprehension

“…The prevalence of the "event comparison" is robust across all items. Furthermore, the fact that more than half of the answers led to plausible interpretations supports the hypothesis that participants were making rational inferences over the comparative illusion sentence, which is consistent with Paape (2023).…”

“…This CI phenomenon was first mentioned in Montalbetti (1984) and has been studied in various psycholinguistic studies (Christensen, 2010(Christensen, , 2016Kelley, 2018;Langsford et al, 2019;Leivada, 2020;O'Connor, 2015;O'Connor et al, 2013;Paape, 2023;Pham, 2022;Wellwood et al, 2018;. However, a comprehensive explanation is still lacking.…”

“…One of the limitations of previous research is that the experimental materials did not contain the exact structures in the CI sentence. While the canonical CI sentence has present perfect tense and aspect (e.g., have been to Russia), the tested materials in previous studies (O 'Connor, 2015;Paape, 2023;Wellwood et al, 2018) usually had past tense (e.g., vacationed in Florida). Given this, it is important to check whether this change affects the illusion pattern observed in previous studies and whether the critical linguistic factors reviewed in the Introduction section still impact the acceptability score.…”

“…Even though Paape (2023) does not provide further details about the processing mechanism, it points to a promising direction and could find resonance in both the event interpretation account by Wellwood et al (2018) and the repair analysis account by O'Connor (2015). That is, even though participants might find the CI sentence formally anomalous, they are able to reconcile with the meaning via possible inference.…”

“…Rational Inference Paape (2023) proposes that the interpretation of comparative illusion sentences involves rational inferences. In a judgment task, participants were asked to read a sentence and made a choice from five options (a = "Get it, correct", b = "Get it, but incorrect", c = "Don't get it, (probably) correct, d = "Don't get it, incorrect", e = "No idea") ("get it" means that the participant claims that he was able to understand the intended meaning; "correct" means that the participant thinks that the sentence is formally correct).…”