What causes lingering misinterpretations of garden-path sentences: Incorrect syntactic representations or fallible memory processes?

Resumen

A key question in research on sentence processing concerns how sentences that have been misanalyzed are reinterpreted, and to what extent the parser’s attempts at revision are successful. Past work has shown that misinterpretations associated with a syntactic misparse linger even after the entire sentence has been processed (Christianson, Hollingworth, Halliwell, & Ferreira, 2001; Slattery, Sturt, Christianson, Yoshida and Ferreira, 2013). In two reading experiments, we sought to evaluate the level of representation that is responsible for misinterpretations of garden-path sentences. We combined reading measures with an offline comprehension task, which enabled us to conditionalize reading time analyses on correct versus incorrect question-answering performance. Our results suggest that reanalysis does not always result in a correct interpretation, either because the final interpretation does not always reflect the global structure or because reanalysis processes result in the creation of licit local trees but fail to generate a complete global parse for the entire sentence.

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Cómo citar (APA 7)

Huang, Y., & Ferreira, F. (2021). What causes lingering misinterpretations of garden-path sentences: Incorrect syntactic representations or fallible memory processes?. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/euazs