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Abstract Previous work has shown that English native speakers interpret sentences as predicted by a noisy‐channel model: They integrate both the real‐world plausibility of the meaning—the prior—and the likelihood that the intended sentence may be corrupted into the perceived sentence. In this study, we test the noisy‐channel model in Mandarin Chinese, a language taxonomically different from English. We present native Mandarin speakers sentences in a written modality (Experiment 1) and an auditory modality (Experiment 2) in three pairs of syntactic alternations. The critical materials are literally implausible but require differing numbers and types of edits in order to form more plausible sentences. Each sentence is followed by a comprehension question that allows us to infer whether the speakers interpreted the item literally, or made an inference toward a more likely meaning. Similar to previous research on related English constructions, Mandarin participants made the most inferences for implausible materials that could be inferred as plausible by deleting a single morpheme or inserting a single morpheme. Participants were less likely to infer a plausible meaning for materials that could be inferred as plausible by making an exchange across a preposition. And participants were least likely to infer a plausible meaning for materials that could be inferred as plausible by making an exchange across a main verb. Moreover, we found more inferences in written materials than spoken materials, possibly a result of a lack of word boundaries in written Chinese. Overall, the fact that the results were so similar to those found in related constructions in English suggests that the noisy‐channel proposal is robust.
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This content will become publicly available on September 25, 2026
The Influence of Prior Semantic Knowledge in Noisy Channel Interpretation
How do comprehenders interpret semantically implausible sentences? Previous studies proposed a noisy-channel framework of sentence comprehension, where communication between a speaker and a comprehender happens in a noisy channel. The comprehender rationally adopts an interpretation of a sentence based on how likely the interpretation is (the semantic prior) and how likely is the interpretation corrupted into the perceived sentence because of noise (the likelihood). The theory predicted that comprehenders would be more likely to adopt a literal interpretation of an implausible sentence if their prior of implausible sentences were higher. To test this hypothesis, Gibson et al. manipulated the proportion of implausible test sentences in two sets of experiments, where participants read a number of sentences and answer a comprehension question following each sentence. Although their results supported the hypothesis, the experiment could be confounded (a) by participants’ adaptation effect (due to different experiment lengths) and (b) by different participants having different strategies to do the task (due to the between-subject design). In our study, we manipulated the semantic prior and controlled for these potential confounds. We found participants exposed to more implausible sentences were indeed more likely to interpret implausible sentences literally. Our results hence offer additional support for the noisy-channel framework.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2121074
- PAR ID:
- 10675771
- Publisher / Repository:
- Sage
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology
- ISSN:
- 1747-0218
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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