ABSTRACT
Plausibility plays a central role in human cognition, whether one is considering the alibi of a murder suspect in a crime novel, or assessing the answers of a candidate in a job interview. Other studies have mentioned plausibility judgements in the service of other phenomena (e.g. Reder, 1982), but often without being investigated in their own right. This paper presents evidence that plausibility judgements depend on inferential coherence and distributional information. In the first experiment, we show that the type of inference being made affects the plausibility of a sentence pair. The second experiment demonstrates that the distributional properties of the words in a sentence pair directly influence plausibility.
