Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Language processing depends on the integration of bottom-upinformation with top-down cues from several differentsources—primarily our knowledge of the real world, ofdiscourse contexts, and of how language works. Previousstudies have shown that factors pertaining to both the senderand the receiver of the message affect the relative weighting ofsuch information. Here, we suggest another factor that maychange our processing strategies: perceptual noise. Wehypothesize that listeners weight different sources of top-downinformation more in situations of perceptual noise than innoise-free situations. Using a sentence-picture matchingexperiment with four forced-choice alternatives, we show thatdegrading the speech input with noise compels the listeners torely more on top-down information in processing. We discussour results in light of previous findings in the literature,highlighting the need for a unified model of spoken languagecomprehension in different ecologically valid situations,including under noisy conditions.