Content deafness: When coherent talk just doesn't matter

We present evidence showing that, contrary to this intuition, people often fail to notice cases of blatant conversational incoherence.Thirty participants engaged in spontaneous face-to-face conversations with a confederate who, 8 min into the conversation, uttered the nonsensical sentence “colorless green ideas sleep furiously”. The sentence was uttered with a clear voice when participants were silent. A minute later the conversation was ended and participants were asked if they had noticed the sentence. Remarkably, only 10 participants noticed.This newly uncovered phenomenon—which we label content deafness—corroborates and extends previous findings with online instant messaging.
Source: Language and Communication - Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research