We report a self-paced reading study that investigated gardenpath sentences like While the boy washed {a/the} dog barked loudly and While the man hunted {a/the} deer ran into the woods. In such sentences, the critical noun phrase (dog, deer) tends to be misparsed as an object of the preceding verb, and has to be re-analyzed as a subject of the following clause when the disambiguating verb (e.g....

Background: Many studies report that the comprehension of sentences derived by movement of phrases is impaired in agrammatism. However, only few studies have explored the comprehension of sentences that involve a movement of the verb. In several languages, the verb can or should move to the second position of a sentence, creating VSO sentences like ‘‘Yesterday ate the girl a watermelon’’ from a...

Late distributive disambiguation, (3), increases reading measures (first pass, total times, regressions) compared to late collective disambiguation, (4). Early distributive disambiguation, (1), does not significantly increase reading measures compared to early collective disambiguation, (2). Interpretation: Potentially ambiguous predicates are interpreted collectively by the processor ⇒ garden-...

We review evidence on how sentences are parsed in Finnish – a morphologically rich language. The reviewed studies focus on effects of word order, morphological agreement, and morphological complexity. As regards word order, it has been shown that infrequent word orders are more difficult to process than frequent word orders. Moreover, pragmatic constraints can wipe out the effect of structural ...

Humor is a common phenomenon in language. One importance prerequisite of its humor effect lies in its incongruity, in the framework of relevance theory that is, the deviation from relevance expectations. According to the features of incongruity-resolution, the article makes the following classification of the humor: garden-path, cognitive contrast and inferring the implication.

This study develops a connection between human parsing preferences and feature selection rankings in a multilingual dependency parser. The results reveal that feature weights reflect the typological characteristics of three languages. Accounting for these differences leads to greater precision in modeling garden path data.