What is it that lingers? Garden-path (mis)interpretations in younger and older adults

Abstract

Previous research has shown that comprehenders do not always conduct a full (re)analysis of temporarily ambiguous "garden-path" sentences. The present study used a sentence-picture matching task to investigate what kind of representations are formed when full reanalysis is not performed: Do comprehenders "blend" two incompatible representations as a result of shallow syntactic processing or do they erroneously maintain the initial incorrect parsing without incorporating new information, and does this vary with age? Twenty-five younger and 15 older adults performed a multiple-choice sentence-picture matching task with stimuli including early-closure garden-path sentences. The results suggest that the type of erroneous representation is affected by linguistic variables, such as sentence structure, verb type, and semantic plausibility, as well as by age. Older adults' response patterns indicate an increased reliance on inferencing based on lexical and semantic cues, with a lower bar for accepting an initial parse and with a weaker drive to reanalyse a syntactic representation. Among younger adults, there was a tendency to blend two representations into a single interpretation, even if this was not licensed by the syntax.

Lingering misinterpretation in native and nonnative sentence processing: Evidence from structural priming

“…This result suggests that the initial misinterpretation remains activated even after reanalysis and influences subsequent language comprehension. Importantly, a number of subsequent works have corroborated this "persistence of misinterpretation" using a variety of research designs (e.g., Christianson, Williams, Zacks, & Ferreira, 2006;Malyutina & den Ouden, 2016;Kaschak & Glenberg, 2004;Nakamura & Arai, 2016;Patson, Darowski, Moon, & Ferreira, 2009;Staub, 2007;Sturt, 2007;van Gompel, Pickering, Pearson, & Jacob, 2006).…”

Reanalysis processes in non-native sentence comprehension

“…One counterargument to this claim is that lower accuracy rates for ambiguous sentences may be an artefact of the design, due to reactivation of the misinterpretation as a result of the comprehension question being more similar to the ambiguous than unambiguous sentences (Tabor, Galantucci & Richardson, 2004). However, corroborating results have been found with various designs that avoid such repetition (e.g., Malyutina & den Ouden, 2016;van Gompel, Pickering, Pearson & Jacob, 2006).…”

When language comprehension goes wrong for the right reasons: Good-enough, underspecified, or shallow language processing

“…In short, the proposal is that language is processed according to a "least effort" principle in the service of establishing and maintaining cognitive equilibrium. How the OCE hypothesis can be squared with results that suggest that structural and heuristic parses co-exist under some conditions (e.g., Lim & Christianson, 2013a, 2013bMalyutina & den Ouden, 2016), or that structural commitments might not be made at all (Logačev & Vasishth, 2016;Swets et al, 2008) would seem to be a fruitful avenue for future research.…”