A noisy-channel approach to depth-charge illusions
Name
SSRN-id4130042.pdf
Description
Submitted version
Size
2.43 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
4d06e8c78ce5b994425236c517cdb22e
Author(s)
Zhang, Yuhan
Ryskin, Rachel
Gibson, Edward
Date Issued
March 2023
Journal
Cognition
Publisher
Elsevier BV
Citation
Zhang, Yuhan, Ryskin, Rachel and Gibson, Edward. 2023. "A noisy-channel approach to depth-charge illusions." Cognition, 232.
Version
Original manuscript
Abstract
The "depth-charge" sentence, No head injury is too trivial to be ignored, is often interpreted as "no matter how trivial head injuries are, we should not ignore them" while the literal meaning is the opposite - "we should ignore them". Four decades of research have failed to resolve the source of this entrenched semantic illusion. Here we adopt the noisy-channel framework for language comprehension to provide a potential explanation. We hypothesize that depth-charge sentences result from inferences whereby comprehenders derive the interpretation by weighing the plausibility of possible readings of the depth-charge sentences against the likelihood of plausible sentences being produced with errors. In four experiments, we find that (1) the more plausible the intended meaning of the depth-charge sentence is, the more likely the sentence is to be misinterpreted; and (2) the higher the likelihood of our hypothesized noise operations, the more likely depth-charge sentences are to be misinterpreted. These results suggest that misinterpretation is affected by both world knowledge and the distance between the depth-charge sentence and a plausible alternative, which is consistent with the noisy-channel framework.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2022.105346
