When language comprehension goes wrong for the right reasons: Good-enough, underspecified, or shallow language processing

Abstract

This paper contains an overview of language processing that can be described as "good enough", "underspecified", or "shallow". The central idea is that a nontrivial proportion of misunderstanding, misinterpretation, and miscommunication can be attributed not to random error, but instead to processing preferences of the human language processing system. In other words, the very architecture of the language processor favours certain types of processing errors because in a majority of instances, this "fast and frugal", less effortful processing is good enough to support communication. By way of historical background, connections are made between this relatively recent facet of psycholinguistic study, other recent language processing models, and related concepts in other areas of cognitive science. Finally, the nine papers included in this special issue are introduced as representative of novel explorations of good-enough, or underspecified, language processing.

When Structure Competes with Semantics: Reading Chinese Relative Clauses

“…Thus, we applied a processing principle from Good-Enough Processing (cf. Christianson, 2016;Ferreira et al, 2003) to explore Chinese relative clause processing patterns. Specifically, Good-Enough Processing predicts that heuristic (i.e., non-syntactic) information, such as plausibility, should exert more influence on the online processing and offline interpretation of syntactic structures that are more difficult to parse, compared to those that are easier to parse.…”

“…Misinterpretations do often happen though, and moreover, they can occur in systematic and predictable ways, not just haphazardly (e.g., due to inattention; see Christianson, 2016). Evidence suggests that misinterpretations are derived from competition between the syntactic structure of the verbatim input and other information sources, i.e., various processing heuristics that can, under certain circumstances, overwhelm the syntactic structure (e.g., Christianson et al, 2001Christianson et al, , 2010Christianson & Luke, 2011;Christianson, Williams, Zacks, & Ferreira, 2006;Ferreira, 2003;den Ouden, Dickey, Anderson, & Christianson, 2016;Ferreira, Bailey, & Ferraro, 2002;Hussey, Ward, Christianson, & Kramer, 2015).…”

“…Good-Enough (GE) Processing theory focuses on accounting for how misinterpretations arise (Christianson, 2016;Ferreira et al, 2002;Ferreira & Patson, 2007). It suggests that readers often rely on a heuristic processing route to build representations that are judged to be good enough to handle the current language comprehension task, but often not good enough to reach an accurate interpretation of the actual language input.…”

“…Within the Good Enough framework (Christianson, 2016;Ferreira et al, 2002), it is proposed that input is subjected to "algorithmic" syntactic parsing as well as "heuristic" processing. The syntactic parse is fragile, however (Ferreira, 2003;Sachs, 1967), and in cases in which the output from the two processing routes conflict, it may be overwhelmed by the output of the heuristic route.…”

“…In order to do so, we employ an experimental paradigm that has been used over the past 15 years within the Good Enough Processing literature (cf. Christianson, 2016;Ferreira & Patson, 2007), which pits asymmetrically plausible thematic role assignments against (purportedly) asymmetrically complex syntactic structures. We describe below how this manipulation results in strong additive interactions in structures such as English passives vs. actives and ORCs vs. SRCs.…”