Language Processing at Its Trickiest: Grammatical Illusions and Heuristics of Judgment

Evelina Leivada

doi:10.3390/languages5030029

Abstract

Humans are intuitively good at providing judgments about what forms part of their native language and what does not. Although such judgments are robust, consistent, and reliable, human cognition is demonstrably fallible to illusions of various types. Language is no exception. In the linguistic domain, several types of sentences have been shown to trick the parser into giving them a high acceptability judgment despite their ill-formedness. One example is the so-called comparative illusion (‘More people have been to Tromsø than I have’). To this day, comparative illusions have been tested mainly with monolingual, neurotypical speakers of English. The present research aims to broaden our understanding of this phenomenon by putting it to test in two populations that differ in one crucial factor: the number of languages they speak. A timed acceptability judgment task was administered to monolingual speakers of Standard Greek and bi(dia)lectal speakers of Standard and Cypriot Greek. The results are not fully in line with any of the semantic re-analyses proposed for the illusion so far, hence a new proposal is offered about what interpretation induces the illusion, appreciating the influence of both grammatical processing and cognitive heuristics. Second, the results reveal an effect of developmental trajectory. This effect may be linked to an enhanced ability to spot the illusion in bi(dia)lectals, but several factors can be identified as possible culprits behind this result. After discussing each of them, it is argued that having two grammars may facilitate the setting of a higher processing threshold, something that would entail decreased fallibility to grammatical illusions.

Highlights

One of the key characteristics of the computational brain is its ability to encode, retrieve, and communicate information, while learning from experience the expected value range of certain variables and continuously updating memory resources (Gallistel and King 2009)
Four reaction times were removed, which led to the elimination of 0.33% of the data
With respect to the acceptability judgments, the results revealed that the illusory effect reported for English speakers holds in Greek

Summary

Introduction

One of the key characteristics of the computational brain is its ability to encode, retrieve, and communicate information, while learning from experience the expected value range of certain variables (e.g., the distance between two places) and continuously updating memory resources (Gallistel and King 2009) Another important characteristic is its tendency toward radical contextualization which, among other things, entails a propensity to (i) adhere to Grice’s four maxims of co-operation, even when the communicative context lacks the conversational features that call for the application of these maxims, and (ii) contextualize incoming stimuli by drawing on those memory resources that are most readily accessible (Kahneman and Tversky 1982; Hilton 1995; Stanovich and According to these maxims, one’s conversational contribution should be as informative as necessary for a successful exchange (Grice 1957): (i) the maxim of quantity suggests that the interlocutors be as informative as possible, providing the necessary information for a successful exchange, and no more/less; (ii) the maxim of quality suggests that the interlocutors do not provide information they believe to be false; (iii) the maxim of relation posits that every contribution should be relevant and pertinent to the discussion; and (iv) the maxim of manner asks for clarity, brevity, and absence of ambiguity in the conversational contributions. Linda is 31 years old, single, outspoken, and very bright She was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and participated in anti-nuclear demonstrations

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