Miscomprehension, meaning, and phonology: The unknown and phonological Armstrong illusions

Abstract

People often fail to detect the anomalous word in questions such as How many animals of each kind did Moses take on the Ark?, and incorrectly answer “two” despite knowing that Noah rather than Moses launched the Ark. The current study tests an account of this “Moses illusion” in which Moses mistakes reflect miscomprehension of the presented word (Moses) as the expected word (Noah) due to bottom-up (phonological) priming, top-down (semantic) priming, or both. Two experiments supported this miscomprehension account: Lexical- and proposition-level information contributed autonomously to miscomprehensions and Moses mistakes in Experiment 1, and prior presentation of nonanomalous information reduced subsequent anomaly detection in Experiment 2. Present results contradict accounts in which Moses mistakes involve semantic but not phonological processes, involve mechanisms different from everyday language comprehension, or involve special anomaly detection mechanisms for calculating the coherence between the Moses question and the anomalous word.