Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Experiments in psycholinguistics allow us to test hypotheses and build theories. However, psycholinguistic experiments often suffer from low ecological validity, because participants are often required to perform an unusual task in the face of unusual materials. In the current experiment, we test the predictions of Noisy Channel Processing in a naturalistic task: identifying the lyrics of a song. We conducted an experiment where participants heard short excerpts from songs and then indicated which one out of four possible transcriptions they had heard. We found that the predictions of Noisy Channel Processing bear out: options with higher prior and likelihood were chosen more often by participants as the perceived song lyrics. Thus, Noisy Channel Processing is successful in explaining the everyday phenomenon of mis-heard song lyrics. More broadly, this suggests that Noisy Channel Processing captures everyday language processing, and that it is not dependent on unnatural experimental tasks and materials.