Center for Language and Brain, HSE University, Moscow, Russia.
Institute of Linguistics, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia.
PLoS One. 2023 Jan 24;18(1):e0277429. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0277429. eCollection 2023.
Noise, as part of real-life communication flow, degrades the quality of linguistic input and affects language processing. According to predictions of the noisy-channel and good-enough processing models, noise should make comprehenders rely more on word-level semantics instead of actual syntactic relations. However, empirical evidence supporting this prediction is still lacking. For the first time, we investigated whether auditory (three-talker babble) and visual (short idioms appearing next to a target sentence on the screen) noise would trigger greater reliance on semantics and make readers of Russian sentences process the sentences superficially. Our findings suggest that, although Russian speakers generally relied on semantics in sentence comprehension, neither auditory nor visual noise increased this reliance. The only effect of noise on semantic processing was found in reading speed under auditory noise measured by first fixation duration: only without noise, the semantically implausible sentences were read slower than semantically plausible ones. These results do not support the predictions of the study based on the noisy-channel and good-enough processing models, which is discussed in light of the methodological differences among the studies of noise and their possible limitations.
噪声作为现实生活中交流流程的一部分，会降低语言输入的质量，并影响语言处理。根据噪声通道和足够好的处理模型的预测，噪声应该使理解者更多地依赖于单词级别的语义，而不是实际的句法关系。然而，支持这一预测的实证证据仍然缺乏。我们首次研究了听觉（三个人的嘈杂声）和视觉（短习语出现在屏幕上的目标句子旁边）噪声是否会引发对语义的更大依赖，并使俄语句子的读者进行表面处理。我们的研究结果表明，尽管俄语使用者通常在句子理解中依赖语义，但无论是听觉噪声还是视觉噪声都没有增加这种依赖。只有在听觉噪声下通过首次注视持续时间测量的阅读速度中，才发现了噪声对语义处理的唯一影响：只有在没有噪声的情况下，语义上不可信的句子比语义上可信的句子阅读速度更慢。这些结果不支持基于噪声通道和足够好的处理模型的研究预测，这在讨论噪声研究之间的方法学差异及其可能的局限性时进行了讨论。
