The return of the repressed: Abandoned parses facilitate syntactic reanalysis☆

Staub, Adrian

doi:10.1016/j.jml.2006.09.001

Cited by 23 publications

(19 citation statements)

References 75 publications

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“…Several recent studies have corroborated Christianson et al's observation that misanalyses appear to linger (Kaschak & Glenberg, 2004;Staub, 2007a;Sturt, 2007;van Gompel, Pickering, Pearson, & Jacob, 2006), though researchers differ on why this might be. For instance see also Christianson et al, 2006) attributed the lingering effect to a failure to fully reanalyze the partial, and ultimately incorrect, syntactic structure constructed during the initial parse of the garden path sentence.…”

Section: ) Exemplifies This Assumptionmentioning

confidence: 73%

Lingering misinterpretations of garden path sentences arise from competing syntactic representations

Slattery

Sturt

Christianson

et al. 2013

Journal of Memory and Language

129

168

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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.3

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Section: ) Exemplifies This Assumptionmentioning

confidence: 73%

Lingering misinterpretations of garden path sentences arise from competing syntactic representations

Slattery

Sturt

Christianson

et al. 2013

Journal of Memory and Language

129

168

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…2001; Kaschak and Glenberg 2004; Lau and Ferreira 2005; van Gompel et al. 2006; Staub 2007; Sturt 2007) have suggested that an abandoned parse of a sentence may be maintained, with some level of activation, along with the correct parse. For example, van Gompel et al.…”

Section: Is There Other Evidence For Parallelism?mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Hopf et al 2003). Sticking to behavioral data, several studies (Christianson et al 2001;Kaschak and Glenberg 2004;Lau and Ferreira 2005;van Gompel et al 2006;Staub 2007;Sturt 2007) have suggested that an abandoned parse of a sentence may be maintained, with some level of activation, along with the correct parse. For example, van Gompel et al (2006) had participants complete sentence fragments containing an optionally transitive verb, for example, When the doctor was visiting.…”

Section: Does Parallelism Really Predict Competition?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Parallelism and Competition in Syntactic Ambiguity Resolution

Clifton¹,

Staub²

2008

Language and Linguist. Compass

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A central issue in sentence‐processing research is whether the parser entertains multiple analyses of syntactically ambiguous input in parallel, and whether these analyses compete for selection. In this article, we review theoretical positions for and against such competitive parallelism. We then review empirical evidence, primarily drawing on reading time studies, bearing on the prediction made by parallel competitive models that some cost ought to be associated with processing syntactically ambiguous material. We argue that this prediction is not confirmed by the data, and we discuss recent claims that the models in question do not actually make this prediction. We also emphasize the contrast with lexical ambiguity, where there is clearly a processing cost associated with competition between alternate meanings. Finally, we review a different kind of recent evidence suggesting that two syntactic analyses may indeed coexist under specific circumstances.

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“…This effect was found on both first pass time and go-past time, and the presence of either did not eliminate the garden path effect. In fact, the garden path effect was numerically smaller when either was absent compared to when either was present (366 ms vs. 368 ms), which was interpreted in terms of the initial syntactic analysis and the reanalysis [25]. Regardless of whether the word either was present or absent, readers adopted the NP-coordination analysis in the ambiguous region, and yet this analysis was abandoned when the S-coordination was confirmed.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 94%

Processing Coordinate Structures in Chinese: Evidence from Eye Movements

Chen

Yan

2012

PLoS ONE

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This article reports the results of an eye-tracking experiment that investigated the processing of coordinate structures in Chinese sentence comprehension. The study tracked the eye movements of native Chinese readers as they read sentences consisting of two independent clauses connected by the word huo zhe. The data strongly confirmed readers' preference for an initial noun phrase (NP)-coordination parsing in Chinese coordination structure. When huo zhe was absent from the beginning of a sentence, we identified a cost associated with abandoning the NP-coordination analysis, which was evident with regard to the second NP when the coordination was unambiguous. Otherwise, this cost was evident with regard to the verb, the syntactically disambiguating region, when the coordination was ambiguous. However, the presence of a sentence-initial huo zhe reduced reading times and regressions in the huo zhe NP and the verb regions. We believe that the word huo zhe at the beginning of a sentence helps the reader predict that the sentence contains a parallel structure. Before the corresponding phrases appear, the readers can use the word huo zhe and the language structure thereafter to predicatively construct the syntactic structure. Such predictive capability can eliminate the reader's preference for NP-coordination analysis. Implications for top-down parsing theory and models of initial syntactic analysis and reanalysis are discussed.

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The return of the repressed: Abandoned parses facilitate syntactic reanalysis☆

Cited by 23 publications

References 75 publications

Lingering misinterpretations of garden path sentences arise from competing syntactic representations

Lingering misinterpretations of garden path sentences arise from competing syntactic representations

Parallelism and Competition in Syntactic Ambiguity Resolution

Processing Coordinate Structures in Chinese: Evidence from Eye Movements

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