When a plane crashes ...

... where should the survivors be buried?

If you are considering where the most appropriate burial place should be, you are not alone.

Scientists have found that around half the people asked this question, answer it as if they were being asked about the victims not the survivors.

What makes researchers particularly interested in people’s failure to notice words that actually don’t make sense, so called semantic illusions, is that these illusions challenge traditional models of language processing which assume that we build understanding of a sentence by deeply analysing the meaning of each word in turn.

Instead semantic illusions provide a strong line of evidence that the way we process language is often shallow and incomplete.

When volunteers read or listened to sentences containing hard-to-detect semantic anomalies -- words that fit the general context even though they do not actually make sense -- the researchers found that when a volunteer was tricked by the semantic illusion his brain had not even noticed the anomalous word.

What to do. The researchers suggest:

We process a word more deeply if it is emphasised in some way. So, in a news story, a newsreader can stress important words that may otherwise be missed and these words can be italicised to make sure we notice them when reading. 

The way we construct sentences can also help reduce misunderstandings. It’s a good idea to put important information first, because we are more likely to miss unusual words when they are near the end of a sentence. Also, we often use an active sentence construction such as 'Bob ate the apple' because we make far more mistakes answering questions about a sentence with a passive construction -- for example 'The apple was eaten by Bob'.

We are lazy listeners. And lazy thinkers.