Language processing over a noisy channel
- Event: Seminar
- Lecturer: Ted Gibson
- Date: 06 September 2016
- Duration: 2 hours
- Venue: Gothenburg
Link to the recorded talk
| Traditional linguistic models of syntax and language processing have assumed an error-free process of language transmission. But we know that this is not the case: people often make errors in both language production and comprehension. This has important ramifications for both models of language processing and language evolution. I first show that language comprehension appears to function as a noisy channel process, in line with communication theory. Given si, the intended sentence, and sp, the perceived sentence we propose that people maximize P(si | sp ), which is equivalent to maximizing the product of the prior P(si) and the likely noise processes P(si → sp ). I show how this simple formulation can explain a wide range of language processing phenomena, such as people’s interpretations of simple sentences, some aphasic language comprehension effects, and the P600 in the ERP literature. Finally, I discuss how thinking of language as communication in this way can explain aspects of the origin of word order, most notably that most human languages are SOV with case-marking, or SVO without case-marking. |
Readings:
Gibson, E., Bergen, L. & Piantadosi, S. (2013). The rational integration of noisy evidence and prior semantic expectations in sentence interpretation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 110(20): 8051-8056. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1216438110. http://tedlab.mit.edu/tedlab_website/researchpapers/Gibson_et_al_2013_PNAS
Gibson, E., Piantadosi, S., Brink, K., Bergen, L., Lim, E. & Saxe, R. (2013). A noisy-channel account of cross-linguistic word order variation. Psychological Science, 4(7): 1079-1088. doi: 10.1177.http://tedlab.mit.edu/tedlab_website/researchpapers/Gibson_et_al_2013_PsychSci.pdf
Gibson, E., Sandberg, C., Fedorenko, E., Bergen, L., & Kiran, S. (2015). A rational inference approach to aphasic language comprehension. Aphasiology. doi: 10.1080/02687038.2015.1111994.http://tedlab.mit.edu/tedlab_website/researchpapers/Gibson_et_al_Aphasiology_2015.pdf