Lingering misinterpretations of garden path sentences arise from competing syntactic representations
Yoshida, Masaya (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Departament de Filologia Catalana)
Slattery, Timothy (University of South Alabama)
Sturt, Patrick (University of Edinburgh)
Chirstianson, Kiel (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)
Ferreira, Fernanda (University of South Carolina)

Date:	2013
Abstract:	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.
Rights:	Aquest document està subjecte a una llicència d'ús Creative Commons. Es permet la reproducció total o parcial, la distribució, i la comunicació pública de l'obra, sempre que no sigui amb finalitats comercials, i sempre que es reconegui l'autoria de l'obra original. No es permet la creació d'obres derivades.
Language:	Anglès
Document:	Article ; recerca ; Versió acceptada per publicar
Published in:	Journal of Memory and Language, Vol. 69 Núm. 2 (2013) , p. 104-120, ISSN 1096-0821

DOI: 10.1016/j.jml.2013.04.001

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