Language Log

Photograph taken at a park in Chiang Mai, Thailand:

Yuhan Zhang, Rachel Ryskin & Edward Gibson, "A noisy-channel approach to depth-charge illusions." Cognition, March 2023:

The “depth-charge” sentence, No head injury is too trivial to be ignored, is often interpreted as “no matter how trivial head injuries are, we should not ignore them” while the literal meaning is the opposite – “we should ignore them”. Four decades of research have failed to resolve the source of this entrenched semantic illusion. Here we adopt the noisy-channel framework for language comprehension to provide a potential explanation. We hypothesize that depth-charge sentences result from inferences whereby comprehenders derive the interpretation by weighing the plausibility of possible readings of the depth-charge sentences against the likelihood of plausible sentences being produced with errors. In four experiments, we find that (1) the more plausible the intended meaning of the depth-charge sentence is, the more likely the sentence is to be misinterpreted; and (2) the higher the likelihood of our hypothesized noise operations, the more likely depth-charge sentences are to be misinterpreted. These results suggest that misinterpretation is affected by both world knowledge and the distance between the depth-charge sentence and a plausible alternative, which is consistent with the noisy-channel framework.

Yuhan Zhang discusses the paper in a thread on Twitter.

Speaking of depth, I'm definitely out of mine when it comes to noisy-channel frameworks. But it isn't the case that I'm not so ignorant as to fail to recognize that this paper is not too unimportant for Language Log not to pay no attention to it.

(Hey, ChatGPT — betcha can't make sense out of that!)

From Kiewwoo Goh:

From the Temu website.

The following mistranslations have been drawn from this collection:

"50 Times Signs Were So Hilariously Translated, People Just Had To Share Them Online", Liucija Adomaite and Justinas Keturka, Bored Panda (about a week ago)

Of the fifty items collected here, I've already dealt with more than half of them in other posts, and another portion are too lame to worry about.

Here goes:

Forgot to turn on the Spanish translator.

From the Facebook account of Mei Han:

Enigmatic East Asian sign: