Noisy memory encoding explains negative polarity illusions
A sentence like "The authors that no critics recommended have ever received acknowledgment for a best-selling novel" is sometimes rated as acceptable even though, strictly speaking, it is ungrammatical because the negative polarity word "ever" is not licensed where it is. This behavioral effect is sometimes called a "negative polarity illusion". Here we propose that the lossy context surprisal theory of Hahn et al. (2022) -- whereby people have an imperfect encoding of complex sentences -- might explain this effect. We hypothesize that people have poor memory representation of the determiners in the main-clause and embedded-clause subjects and could entertain a determiner exchange that li...
| Authors | Yuhan Zhang, Edward Gibson |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 3 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 3 June 2026 |
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