Language Processing at Its Trickiest: Grammatical Illusions and Heuristics of Judgment
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 domai...
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fttriple:oai:gotriple.eu:oai:doaj.org/article:b3ee28f2ab3c434dbca96141cf99f0b8 2023-05-15T18:34:48+02:00 Language Processing at Its Trickiest: Grammatical Illusions and Heuristics of Judgment Evelina Leivada 2020-07-01 https://doi.org/10.3390/languages5030029 https://doaj.org/article/b3ee28f2ab3c434dbca96141cf99f0b8 en eng MDPI AG doi:10.3390/languages5030029 2226-471X https://doaj.org/article/b3ee28f2ab3c434dbca96141cf99f0b8 undefined Languages, Vol 5, Iss 29, p 29 (2020) bilectalism grammatical illusions acceptability judgments reaction times parsing psy lang Journal Article https://vocabularies.coar-repositories.org/resource_types/c_6501/ 2020 fttriple https://doi.org/10.3390/languages5030029 2023-01-22T19:30:01Z 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. Article in Journal/Newspaper Tromsø Unknown Tromsø Languages 5 3 29 |
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bilectalism grammatical illusions acceptability judgments reaction times parsing psy lang |
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bilectalism grammatical illusions acceptability judgments reaction times parsing psy lang Evelina Leivada Language Processing at Its Trickiest: Grammatical Illusions and Heuristics of Judgment |
topic_facet |
bilectalism grammatical illusions acceptability judgments reaction times parsing psy lang |
description |
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. |
format |
Article in Journal/Newspaper |
author |
Evelina Leivada |
author_facet |
Evelina Leivada |
author_sort |
Evelina Leivada |
title |
Language Processing at Its Trickiest: Grammatical Illusions and Heuristics of Judgment |
title_short |
Language Processing at Its Trickiest: Grammatical Illusions and Heuristics of Judgment |
title_full |
Language Processing at Its Trickiest: Grammatical Illusions and Heuristics of Judgment |
title_fullStr |
Language Processing at Its Trickiest: Grammatical Illusions and Heuristics of Judgment |
title_full_unstemmed |
Language Processing at Its Trickiest: Grammatical Illusions and Heuristics of Judgment |
title_sort |
language processing at its trickiest: grammatical illusions and heuristics of judgment |
publisher |
MDPI AG |
publishDate |
2020 |
url |
https://doi.org/10.3390/languages5030029 https://doaj.org/article/b3ee28f2ab3c434dbca96141cf99f0b8 |
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Tromsø |
geographic_facet |
Tromsø |
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Tromsø |
genre_facet |
Tromsø |
op_source |
Languages, Vol 5, Iss 29, p 29 (2020) |
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doi:10.3390/languages5030029 2226-471X https://doaj.org/article/b3ee28f2ab3c434dbca96141cf99f0b8 |
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op_doi |
https://doi.org/10.3390/languages5030029 |
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Languages |
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5 |
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3 |
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29 |
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