Rational Language Comprehension Depends on Priors about Both Meaning and Structure

Kód výsledku v 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>

Výsledek na webu

<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>

Jazyk výsledku

angličtina

Název v původním jazyce

Rational Language Comprehension Depends on Priors about Both Meaning and Structure

Popis výsledku v původním jazyce

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

Název v anglickém jazyce

Rational Language Comprehension Depends on Priors about Both Meaning and Structure

Popis výsledku anglicky

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

Druh

J_SC - Článek v periodiku v databázi SCOPUS

CEP obor

—

OECD FORD obor

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

Projekt

—

Návaznosti

—

Rok uplatnění

2025

Kód důvěrnosti údajů

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

Název periodika

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning Memory and Cognition

ISSN

0278-7393

e-ISSN

—

Svazek periodika

2025

Číslo periodika v rámci svazku

2025

Stát vydavatele periodika

US - Spojené státy americké

Počet stran výsledku

17

Strana od-do

1-17

Kód UT WoS článku

—

EID výsledku v databázi Scopus

2-s2.0-105003082933