{"pk":26130,"title":"Structure-sensitive Noise Inference: Comprehenders Expect Exchange Errors","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Previous research has found that comprehenders are willingto adopt non-literal interpretations of sentences whose literalreading is unlikely. Several studies found evidence that com-prehenders decide whether or not a given utterance should betaken at face value in accordance with principles of Bayesianrationality, by weighing the prior probability of potential inter-pretations against the degree to which they are (in)consistentwith the literal form of the utterance. While all of these re-sults are consistent with string-edit noise models, many errorprocesses are known to be sensitive to the underlying linguis-tic structure of the intended utterance. Here, we explore thecase of exchange errors and provide experimental evidencethat comprehenders’ noise model is structure-sensitive. Ourresults add further support to the noisy-channel theory of lan-guage comprehension, extend the set of known noise opera-tions to include positional exchanges, and show that compre-henders’ noise models are well-adapted to structure-sensitivesources of signal corruption during communication.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"rational analysis; noisy-channel comprehension;non-literal interpretation;"}],"section":"Papers","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7vx580zr","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Till","middle_name":"","last_name":"Poppels","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of California, San Diego","department":""},{"first_name":"Roger","middle_name":"P.","last_name":"Levy","name_suffix":"","institution":"Massachusetts Institute of Technology","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2016-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/26130/galley/15766/download/"}]}