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Parsing the late-closure ambiguity: While Schrödinger measured the cat escaped from the box

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Abstract

An experiment investigated the "good-enough" processing account regarding how people parse sentences with late-closure ambiguity, such as While Anna dressed the baby who was cute and cuddly spit up on the bed. One possible result of an initial misparse of the sentence (thinking that Anna dressed the baby) is that the correct parse then cannot be created. The alternative is that, although the misparse may linger in the comprehender’s mind, the correct parse is eventually established and coexists with the misparse. This study approached this issue through an analogy to quantum physics. When photons are directed toward two small slits, it appears as if each photon passes through both slits (“bothness”). If particles not subject to quantum effects are directed at the slits, they pass through one or the other (“oneness”). Participants read sentences containing the late-closure ambiguity and afterward answered two questions about each sentence. These could query the potential misparse (Did Anna dress the baby?), correct-parse (Did Anna dress herself?), or the main clause (Did the baby spit up on the bed?), and the order of the question types was varied to test for quantum measurement context effects. The results supported "oneness," that is, the correct-parse and misparse of the subordinate clause do not coexist. Participants rarely said "yes" to both the misparse and correct-parse questions, and the "yes" response proportions for these two questions invariably added up to around 1.0. Furthermore, no quantum-like measurement-order effect between misparse and correct-parse questions was found.

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Data availability

The datasets generated during the current study are available at Open Science Framework (https://osf.io/8kpu6/).

Code availability

The codes generated during the current study are available at Open Science Framework (https://osf.io/8kpu6/).

Notes

  1. We are not claiming that parsing phenomena are caused by the quantum nature of reality, nor are we using the mathematics of quantum theory. Rather, issues of uncertainty and measurement dependence arise in both domains, and hence drawing the analogy may be useful.

  2. "Bothness" is emphasized in Schrödinger's famous thought experiment, in which a threatened cat is enclosed in an opaque box. The cat is both alive and dead.

  3. The critical p-value was .025 after applying Bonferroni correction for multiple comparisons.

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Acknowledgement

We thank Susan Garnsey, Kiel Christianson, and Nadya Mason for their valuable feedback.

Funding

This study was funded by the Arts and Sciences Fund for Excellence from the University of Colorado Boulder.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics, Florida State University, 625 University Way, Tallahassee, FL, 32306, USA

    Zhiying Qian

  2. Department of Psychology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana-Champaign, IL, USA

    Gary S. Dell

  3. Beckman Institute of Advanced Science and Technology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana-Champaign, IL, USA

    Gary S. Dell

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  1. Zhiying Qian
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Correspondence to Zhiying Qian.

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Ethics approval

The study was conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki and approved by the Institutional Review Board of University of Colorado Boulder (protocol code 17-0404 and July 27, 2017) for studies involving humans.

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Informed consent was obtained from all subjects involved in the study.

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Open practices statement

The data and materials for the experiment are available at the Open Science Framework (https://osf.io/8kpu6/). The experiment was not preregistered.

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Qian, Z., Dell, G.S. Parsing the late-closure ambiguity: While Schrödinger measured the cat escaped from the box. Psychon Bull Rev 31, 401–409 (2024). https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-023-02363-6

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