2024/08/08 by Dario Paape · 1 voice · 1 citation
Computer Science · Neuroscience · Psychology · #Neurobiology of Language and Bilingualism #Reading and Literacy Development #Topic Modeling
paper · pdf · doi:10.1080/23273798.2024.2387226
openalex publication_date 2024/08/08 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/17
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 conscious 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 conscious 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 conscious rational inference and good-enough processing, as well as purely grammar-driven 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.