A Verbal Illusion Reexamined

The so-called depth charge sentences, as is the case with the famous sentence ‘no head injury is too trivial to be ignored,’ have been investigated in the past in a series of experiments. The aim of this study is to re-examine the verbal illusion that is associated with the understanding of some semantically and syntactically strange sentences, and to replicate Natsopoulos’s (1985) classic research within the mo dern Greek native speaking population. Three experiments were conducted in the Greek language with the use of variations of sentences that are claimed to create a misunderstanding in their interpretation. In total, one hundred and fifty-one native Greek speaking participants with no specific education in psycholinguistics were examined with a series of sentences. Results from the three current experiments revealed that there were some differences in the performance of the current Greek participants when compared to the performance of a similar sample of Greek native speakers thirty years ago regarding the different verbal variations of several anomalous sentences. Additionally, there were some differences in the English and Greek languages, but there was a strong verbal illusion regardless of the experimental manipulation in all of the reported studies. Although there is a differentiation in performance for this verbal phenomenon across the participants’ samples, future research should further investigate the cognitive and emotional factors that may contribute to the stable existence of this verbal illusion.