O'Leary Ryan M, Omori-Hoffe Natalie, Dugan Griffin, Wingfield Arthur
Department of Psychology and Volen National Center for Complex Systems, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA, USA.
Mem Cognit. 2025 Jun 23. doi: 10.3758/s13421-025-01748-3.
Although listeners may have the competence to engage in a word-by-word analysis to build a syntactic representation of a heard sentence, in everyday conversation, listeners may, almost by necessity, process the sentence only to a shallow or "good enough" level to derive its meaning. The possibility has been raised that processing schemata may be flexible, such that under some circumstances, comprehension decisions are more likely to be based on an incomplete analysis. We report two experiments in which adult participants were tested on their ability to determine the meaning of auditorily presented plausible or implausible sentences. In both experiments, participants were given two different orienting instructions while completing the listening task (instructions that emphasized either the speed or accuracy of the comprehension decision). In Experiment 1, we also manipulated spectral clarity such that speech was either heard clearly or degraded in spectral richness. A unique use of hierarchical drift-diffusion modeling was employed to probe latent decision-making processes that influenced the participants' comprehension decision. Results indicate that orienting instructions that emphasize speed and perceptual challenge both increase the likelihood that the assumed meaning of implausible sentences will be based on plausibility. Drift-diffusion modeling revealed a dissociation where orienting instructions selectively influenced the amount of evidence required for the participant to make a comprehension decision while sentence plausibility selectively influenced the rate of evidence accumulation. These drift-diffusion model findings were replicated in Experiment 2. Results suggest that comprehension processes are highly flexible and can be characterized in terms of underlying decision-making mechanisms.
尽管听众可能具备逐字分析以构建所听句子句法表征的能力，但在日常对话中，听众几乎必然只能对句子进行浅层次或“足够好”的加工以理解其含义。有人提出，加工模式可能是灵活的，即在某些情况下，理解决策更有可能基于不完整的分析。我们报告了两项实验，在实验中对成年参与者判断听觉呈现的合理或不合理句子含义的能力进行了测试。在两项实验中，参与者在完成听力任务时都收到了两种不同的定向指令（强调理解决策速度或准确性的指令）。在实验1中，我们还对频谱清晰度进行了操控，使语音要么听得清晰，要么频谱丰富度降低。我们采用了分层漂移扩散模型这一独特方法来探究影响参与者理解决策的潜在决策过程。结果表明，强调速度和感知挑战的定向指令都增加了不合理句子的假定含义基于合理性的可能性。漂移扩散模型揭示了一种分离现象，即定向指令选择性地影响参与者做出理解决策所需的证据量，而句子合理性则选择性地影响证据积累的速度。这些漂移扩散模型的结果在实验2中得到了重复。结果表明，理解过程具有高度灵活性，可以根据潜在的决策机制来描述。
