A noisy-channel approach to depth-charge illusions
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 fail...
| Main Authors: | , , |
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| Other Authors: | |
| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Elsevier BV
2023
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| Online Access: | https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/148806 |
| _version_ | 1811097936148299776 |
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| author | Zhang, Yuhan Ryskin, Rachel Gibson, Edward |
| author2 | Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences |
| author_facet | Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences Zhang, Yuhan Ryskin, Rachel Gibson, Edward |
| author_sort | Zhang, Yuhan |
| collection | MIT |
| description | 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. |
| first_indexed | 2024-09-23T17:07:20Z |
| format | Article |
| id | mit-1721.1/148806 |
| institution | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| language | English |
| last_indexed | 2024-09-23T17:07:20Z |
| publishDate | 2023 |
| publisher | Elsevier BV |
| record_format | dspace |
| spelling | mit-1721.1/1488062024-03-08T04:09:32Z A noisy-channel approach to depth-charge illusions Zhang, Yuhan Ryskin, Rachel Gibson, Edward Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences 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. 2023-03-28T13:26:16Z 2023-03-28T13:26:16Z 2023-03 2023-03-28T13:04:18Z Article http://purl.org/eprint/type/JournalArticle https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/148806 Zhang, Yuhan, Ryskin, Rachel and Gibson, Edward. 2023. "A noisy-channel approach to depth-charge illusions." Cognition, 232. en 10.1016/j.cognition.2022.105346 Cognition Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ application/pdf Elsevier BV SSRN |
| spellingShingle | Zhang, Yuhan Ryskin, Rachel Gibson, Edward A noisy-channel approach to depth-charge illusions |
| title | A noisy-channel approach to depth-charge illusions |
| title_full | A noisy-channel approach to depth-charge illusions |
| title_fullStr | A noisy-channel approach to depth-charge illusions |
| title_full_unstemmed | A noisy-channel approach to depth-charge illusions |
| title_short | A noisy-channel approach to depth-charge illusions |
| title_sort | noisy channel approach to depth charge illusions |
| url | https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/148806 |
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