EXPRESS: The Influence of Prior Semantic Knowledge in Noisy Channel Interpretation

How do comprehenders interpret semantically implausible sentences? Previous studies (e.g. Gibson et al., 2013) 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., (2013) 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 was confounded by participants' adaptation effect, or their idiosyncrasy. The first confound was a result of the difference in experiment length, whereas the second confound was a result of the relatively small number of participants recruited in Gibson et al., (2013). In our study, we manipulated the semantic prior and controlled for these 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.