Do we rely on good-enough processing in reading under auditory and visual noise?

• Published in: PloS one 2023-01, Vol.18 (1), p.e0277429
• Main Authors: Nina Zdorova, Svetlana Malyutina, Anna Laurinavichyute, Anastasiia Kaprielova, Anastasia Ziubanova, Anastasiya Lopukhina
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 1932-6203
• DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0277429

Noise, as part of real-life communication flow, degrades the quality of linguistic input and affects language processing. According to predictions of the noisy-channel and good-enough processing models, noise should make comprehenders rely more on word-level semantics instead of actual syntactic relations. However, empirical evidence supporting this prediction is still lacking. For the first time, we investigated whether auditory (three-talker babble) and visual (short idioms appearing next to a target sentence on the screen) noise would trigger greater reliance on semantics and make readers of Russian sentences process the sentences superficially. Our findings suggest that, although Russian speakers generally relied on semantics in sentence comprehension, neither auditory nor visual noise increased this reliance. The only effect of noise on semantic processing was found in reading speed under auditory noise measured by first fixation duration: only without noise, the semantically implausible sentences were read slower than semantically plausible ones. These results do not support the predictions of the study based on the noisy-channel and good-enough processing models, which is discussed in light of the methodological differences among the studies of noise and their possible limitations.