Experimental philosophy’s ‘sources project’ seeks to developpsychological explanations of philosophically relevantintuitions which help us assess their evidentiary value. Thispaper develops a psycholinguistic explanation of intuitionsprompted by brief philosophical case-descriptions. For proofof concept, we target intuitions underlying a classic paradoxabout perception (‘argument from hallucination’). We tracethem to stereotype-driven inferences automatically executedin verb comprehension. We employ a forced-choiceplausibility-ranking task to show that contextuallyinappropriate stereotypical inferences are made from lesssalient uses of the verb “to see”. This yields a debunkingexplanation which resolves the philosophical paradox.

In this study, we tested the possibility that different word orders engender different processing preferences. Our key hypothesis was that a head-initial language like English (SVO) allows more prediction compared to a head-final language like Japanese (SOV). In Experiment 1, English and Japanese native speakers completed a cloze task in which they heard a sentence fragment (SV_ in English and SO_ in Japanese) and had to complete it with the word they thought best. We assessed cloze probability of the words produced and voice onset times. Experiment 2 examined written completions in English, in which we compared the cloze probabilities in SV_ fragments versus OS_ fragments. Following the central hypothesis, this experiment allowed us to determine (within language) whether there is more prediction from a noun and verb compared to two nouns. Finally, in Experiment 3, we compared written completions in English and Japanese, in which the stimuli given to participants were identical (SV_ in English and S_V in Japanese). Results across all three experiments were consistent with greater prediction in English. We argue that prediction is one important factor in processing, that it is relied on more in English than in Japanese, and that prediction will be especially favored in languages like English in which the verb regularly precedes its direct object.

In this study, the influence of two types of language on memory for object location was investigated: demonstratives (this, that) and possessives (my, your). Participants read instructions (containing this/that/my/your/the) to place objects at different locations. They then had to recall those object locations. Experiments 1 and 2 tested the contrasting predictions of two possible accounts of language on memory: the expectation model (Coventry, Griffiths, & Hamilton, 2014) and the congruence account (Bonfiglioli, Finocchiaro, Gesierich, Rositani, & Vescovi, 2009). In Experiment 3, the role of attention as a possible mechanism was investigated. The results across all three experiments show striking effects of language on object location memory; objects in the “that” and “your” condition were misremembered to be further away than objects in the “this” and “my” condition. The data favored the expectation model: expected location cued by language and actual location are concatenated leading to (mis)memory for object location.