🚨 New open-access paper out now in PB&R: We (w/ @LanguageMIT, @AphasiaLab) explore how individuals with aphasia interpret sentences & whether their comprehension difficulties stem from increased expectations of noise in language input. 🧵👇.

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6/ These findings suggest that some comprehension challenges in aphasia may be due to altered *expectations about noise* rather than a purely syntactic deficit. Understanding language processing in aphasia through a noisy-channel lens could inform new approaches to treatment.

5/ What about ppl w/ aphasia? .✅ They rely more on noisy-channel inferences than healthy adults, even when we account for differences in guessing btwn populations using a hierarchical mixture model. 🔹 Unlike healthy adults, their ability to adapt to noise remains unclear.

4/ ✅ Healthy adults make non-literal/noisy-channel inferences when interpreting these sentences, replicating many prior studies. ✅ They are also more likely to make noisy-channel inferences when their expectation of noise is higher (i.e., when exposed to more errors).

3/ We tested this by examining how healthy adults and ppl w/ aphasia (N=28) infer the meanings of sentences which are syntactically well-formed but semantically implausible (e.g., The mother gave the candle the daughter). We also manipulated the probability of noise in the expt.

2/ On a noisy-channel account, comprehenders infer the intended meaning of a sentence based on the prior probability and the likelihood of a noise corruption. Ppl w/ aphasia may expect more noise/errors & be more likely to interpret sentences in terms of a more probable meaning.

1/ People with “agrammatic” aphasia often rely on semantic plausibility rather than syntax when interpreting sentences. But is this due to a loss of syntactic knowledge, or something else? Gibson et al. (2015) suggest a different explanation: noisy-channel processing.

RT @weijiexu_97: Glad to share that our paper (with @rljfutrell) is now on JML. In this paper, we proposed strategic memory allocation as a….

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