Noisy memory encoding explains negative polarity illusions
Quick Take
The study proposes that negative polarity illusions, such as the acceptability of ungrammatical sentences, arise from lossy memory encoding. Using acceptability judgment tasks, it shows that similar determiners amplify these illusions, supporting the idea that language processing is imperfect and resource-rational under memory constraints.
Key Points
- Negative polarity illusions occur when ungrammatical sentences are rated as acceptable.
- The lossy context surprisal theory explains imperfect encoding of complex sentences.
- Judgment tasks showed stronger illusions with similar determiners like 'few' and 'many'.
- The findings suggest human language processing is rationally reconstructed from noisy input.
- Memory limitations influence how determiners are represented in sentence processing.
Article Content
From source RSS / original summaryarXiv:2606. 04340v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A sentence like "The authors that no critics recommended have ever received acknowledgment for a best-selling novel" is sometimes rated as acceptable even though, strictly speaking, it is ungrammatical because the negative polarity word "ever" is not licensed where it is. This behavioral effect is sometimes called a "negative polarity illusion". Here we propose that the lossy context surprisal theory of Hahn et al.
(2022) -- whereby people have an imperfect encoding of complex sentences -- might explain this effect. We hypothesize that people have poor memory representation of the determiners in the main-clause and embedded-clause subjects and could entertain a determiner exchange that licenses ever. We propose that more similar determiners in those positions would trigger stronger illusion effects. Acceptability judgment tasks with six novel determiner pairs (e. g.
, "few" and "many", "few" and "most") support our proposal, showing, specifically, that a novel sentence, "Many authors that few critics recommended have ever received acknowledgment for a best-selling novel", triggered a much stronger illusion than the canonical one even without time pressure.
These results offer further support for the suggestion that human language processing is imperfect and resource-rational: in face of working memory limitations, humans rationally reconstruct what is most likely from noisy linguistic input to facilitate downstream processing.
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