Practical Report

Studying language illusions can reveal a great deal about the language comprehension process. There has been a considerable amount of research into language, using both animal (Pepperberg, 2013) and human models. By understanding what causes these errors to occur we can gain insight into linguistic processing. However, there has been significant debate as to what factors influence linguistic illusions.

One of the earliest studies to investigate linguistic illusions was conducted by Erikson and Mattson (Erikson and Mattson, 1981). When asked the question, “How many animals of each kind did Moses take on the Ark?” many people answered ‘two’ although they knew the correct answer was Noah rather than Moses. Erikson and Mattson termed this tendency to overlook distortions, the Moses Illusion (Erikson and Mattson, 1981). The failure to notice the distorted term continued despite reading the question aloud. Researchers noted the illusion was only observed when the inconsistent name was semantically similar to the correct name. Considering the example given above, both Noah and Moses are major biblical figures, they both received messages from God and they both led their followers from adversity (Erikson and Mattson, 1981). When the names were semantically dissimilar, as in the question, “How many animals of each kind did Nixon take on the ark?”, participants failed to demonstrate the Moses Illusion (Erikson and Mattson, 1981; Bredart and Modolo, 1988). This supported their conclusion that the Moses Illusion was sensitive to semantic similarity.

However, other researchers have questioned the conclusion drawn by Erikson and Mattson. Bredart and Modolo (Bredart and Modolo, 1988) found the illusion mainly occurs when the incorrect name belon...

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...he unfocussed condition would be less likely to detect statement distortions.

Works Cited

Bredart, S., & Modolo, K. (1988). Moses strikes again: Focalization effect on a semantic illusion. Acta Psychologica, 67(2), 135-144.

Erickson, T. D., & Mattson, M. E. (1981). From words to meaning: A semantic illusion. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 20(5), 540-551.

Kamas, E. N., Reder, I. M., & Ayers, M. S. (1996). Partial matching in the Moses illusion: Response bias not sensitivity. Memory & Cognition, 24(6), 687-699.

Morris, R. K., & Folk, J. R. (1998). Focus as a contextual priming mechanism in reading. Memory & Cognition, 26(6), 1313-1322.

Park, H., & Reder, L. M. (2004). Moses illusion: Implication for human cognition. Cognitive illusions, 275-291.

Pepperberg, I. M. (2013). Abstract concepts: data from a grey parrot. Behavioural processes, 93, 82-90.