Why Do Readers Answer Questions Incorrectly After Reading Garden-path Sentences?

Readers misinterpret garden-path sentences such as While the man hunted the deer that was brown and graceful ran into the woods as meaning The man hunted the deer that was brown and graceful and the deer ran into the woods. The “Goodenough” processing account proposes that misinterpretation occurs when readers are satisfied with the interpretation derived from the first-pass parse, and thus do not bother to fully reanalyze the sentence (Ferreira et al., 2001; Christianson et al., 2001). Such an account predicts that there should be more evidence of reanalysis at the disambiguating verb (ran) on trials with correct responses to the question Did the man hunt the deer?, than on those with incorrect responses. The present study tested this prediction using separate self-paced reading and event-related brain potential (ERP) experiments. Results from Experiment 1 (self-paced reading) showed no difference in the reading time at the disambiguating verb between trials that were answered correctly and those that were answered incorrectly. Experiment 2 (ERP) corroborated this finding by showing no difference in the amplitude of the P600 component elicited by the disambiguating verb in trials with correct responses and those with incorrect responses. However, results from a norming experiment showed that plausibility information significantly predicted question accuracy in both experiments. Overall, these results suggest that responses to questions intended to probe whether garden-path sentences are fully reanalyzed do not always answer that question, but can instead be determined primarily by the plausibility of the events described in that question.