Rational Language Comprehension Depends on Priors about Both Meaning and Structure

Result code in IS VaVaI

<a href="https://www.isvavai.cz/riv?ss=detail&h=RIV%2F00216208%3A11320%2F26%3AZ9VGDGZU" target="_blank" >RIV/00216208:11320/26:Z9VGDGZU - isvavai.cz</a>

Result on the web

<a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/xlm0001470" target="_blank" >http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/xlm0001470</a>

DOI - Digital Object Identifier

<a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/xlm0001470" target="_blank" >10.1037/xlm0001470</a>

Result language

angličtina

Original language name

Rational Language Comprehension Depends on Priors about Both Meaning and Structure

Original language description

Language comprehension relies on integrating the perceived utterance with prior expectations. Previous investigations of expectations about sentence structure (the structural prior) have found that comprehenders often interpret rare constructions nonliterally. However, this work has mostly relied on analytic languages like English, where word order is the main way to indicate syntactic relations in the sentence. This raises the possibility that the structural prior over word order is not a universal part of the sentence processing toolkit, but rather a tool acquired only by speakers of languages where word order has special importance as the main source of syntactic information in the sentence. Moving away from English tomake conclusions about more general cognitive strategies (Blasi et al., 2022), we investigate whether the structural prior over word order is a part of language processing more universally using Hindi and Russian, synthetic languages with flexible word order. We conducted two studies in Hindi (Ns = 50, 57, the latter preregistered) and three studies with the same materials, translated, in Russian (Ns = 50, 100, 100, all preregistered), manipulating plausibility and structural frequency. Structural frequency was manipulated by comparing simple clauses with the canonical wordorder (subject–object–verb in Hindi, subject–verb–object in Russian) to ones with a noncanonical (low frequency) word order (object–subject–verb in Hindi, object–verb–subject in Russian). We found that noncanonical sentences were interpreted nonliterally more often than canonical sentences, even though we used flexible-word-order languages. We conclude that the structural prior over word order is always evaluated in language processing, regardless of language type. © 2025 American Psychological Association

Czech name

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Czech description

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Type

J_SC - Article in a specialist periodical, which is included in the SCOPUS database

CEP classification

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OECD FORD branch

10201 - Computer sciences, information science, bioinformathics (hardware development to be 2.2, social aspect to be 5.8)

Project

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Continuities

—

Publication year

2025

Confidentiality

S - Úplné a pravdivé údaje o projektu nepodléhají ochraně podle zvláštních právních předpisů

Name of the periodical

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning Memory and Cognition

ISSN

0278-7393

e-ISSN

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Volume of the periodical

2025

Issue of the periodical within the volume

2025

Country of publishing house

US - UNITED STATES

Number of pages

17

Pages from-to

1-17

UT code for WoS article

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EID of the result in the Scopus database

2-s2.0-105003082933