Abstract

In the literature dealing with the reanalysis of garden path sentences such as While the man hunted the deer ran into the woods, it is generally assumed that people either completely repair their initial incorrect syntactic representations yielding a final interpretation whose syntactic structure is fully consistent with the input string, or that the parse fails. In a series of five experiments, we explored the possibility that partial reanalyses take place. Specifically, we examined the conditions under which part of the initial incorrect analysis persists at the same time that part of the correct final analysis is constructed. In Experiments 1a and 1b, we found that both the length of the ambiguous region and the plausibility of the ultimate interpretation affected the likelihood that such sentences would be fully reanalyzed. In Experiment 2, we compared garden path sentences with non-garden path sentences and compared performance on two different types of comprehension questions. In...

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