Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Recent work suggests that language understanding is the result of rational inference over a noisy channel. Uponperceiving a sentence, listeners decode the speaker’s intended sentence from the prior probability that a speaker would say thatsentence and the probability that it would be corrupted to the perceived sentence by noise. Here we examine the listener’snoise model. Readers were asked to correct sentences if they thought they contained an error. We manipulated context suchthat participants corrected exposure sentences containing either deletion, insertion, swap, mixed, or no errors (e.g., swap: Abystander was rescued by the fireman in the time of nick.). Test sentences were syntactically licensed but implausible (e.g., Thebat swung the player). On test sentences, participants’ corrections differed by exposure condition. This suggests participantstrack the type of errors that have a higher likelihood and make inferences about the intentions of the speaker accordingly.