Decoding ‘noisy’ language in daily life
Suppose you hear someone say, “The man gave the ice cream the child.” Does that sentence seem plausible? Or do you assume it is missing a word? Such as: “The man gave the ice cream to the child.”A new study by MIT researchers indicates that when we process language, we often make these kinds of mental edits. Moreover, it suggests that we seem to use specific strategies for making sense of confusing information — the “noise” interfering with the signal conveyed in language, as researchers think of it. “Even at the sentence level of language, there is a potential loss of information over a noisy channel,” says Edward Gibson, a professor in MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences (BCS) and Department of Linguistics and Philosophy. Gibson and two co-authors detail the strategies at work in a new paper, “Rational integration of noisy evidence and prior semantic expectations in sentence...