TY - JOUR
T1 - Lingering misinterpretations of garden path sentences arise from competing syntactic representations
AU - Slattery, Timothy J.
AU - Sturt, Patrick
AU - Christianson, Kiel
AU - Yoshida, Masaya
AU - Ferreira, Fernanda
N1 - Funding Information:
We would like to thank Danika Paskvan for her excellent proofreading of this manuscript. This research was supported by an NFS Grant (BCS-0847533) to Kiel Christianson.
PY - 2013/8
Y1 - 2013/8
N2 - Recent work has suggested that readers' initial and incorrect interpretation of temporarily ambiguous ("garden path") sentences (e.g., Christianson, Hollingworth, Halliwell, & Ferreira, 2001) sometimes lingers even after attempts at reanalysis. These lingering effects have been attributed to incomplete reanalysis. In two eye tracking experiments, we distinguish between two types of incompleteness: the language comprehension system might not build a faithful syntactic structure, or it might not fully erase the structure built during an initial misparse. The first experiment used reflexive binding and the gender mismatch paradigm to show that a complete and faithful structure is built following processing of the garden-path. The second experiment used two-sentence texts to examine the extent to which the garden-path meaning from the first sentence interferes with reading of the second. Together, the results indicate that misinterpretation effects are attributable not to failure in building a proper structure, but rather to failure in cleaning up all remnants of earlier attempts to build that syntactic representation.
AB - Recent work has suggested that readers' initial and incorrect interpretation of temporarily ambiguous ("garden path") sentences (e.g., Christianson, Hollingworth, Halliwell, & Ferreira, 2001) sometimes lingers even after attempts at reanalysis. These lingering effects have been attributed to incomplete reanalysis. In two eye tracking experiments, we distinguish between two types of incompleteness: the language comprehension system might not build a faithful syntactic structure, or it might not fully erase the structure built during an initial misparse. The first experiment used reflexive binding and the gender mismatch paradigm to show that a complete and faithful structure is built following processing of the garden-path. The second experiment used two-sentence texts to examine the extent to which the garden-path meaning from the first sentence interferes with reading of the second. Together, the results indicate that misinterpretation effects are attributable not to failure in building a proper structure, but rather to failure in cleaning up all remnants of earlier attempts to build that syntactic representation.
KW - Eye movement
KW - Good enough sentence processing
KW - Parsing
KW - Reading
KW - Reanalysis
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84878506960&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=84878506960&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.jml.2013.04.001
DO - 10.1016/j.jml.2013.04.001
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84878506960
SN - 0749-596X
VL - 69
SP - 104
EP - 120
JO - Journal of Memory and Language
JF - Journal of Memory and Language
IS - 2
ER -