The present study sought to investigate the comprehension of Garden-Path structures by Iranian EFL learners. 50 female students of Kharazmi English Language Institute in Karaj participated in this study. All of the participants were native speakers of Persian studying in Kharazmi English language institute in Karaj, Iran. They ranged from 18 to 30 in terms of age. The participants were administ...

Background: Recent studies have indicated that working memory is not a unitary resource and that different types of working memory are used for different types of linguistic processing: syntactic, semantic, and phonological. Phonological working memory was found to support the comprehension of sentences that require re-access to the word-form of a word that appeared earlier in the sentence. Aim...

Theories of sentence comprehension have addressed both initial parsing processes and mechanisms responsible for reanalysis. Three experiments are summarized that were designed to investigate the reanalysis and interpretation of relatively difficult garden-path sentences (e.g., While Anna dressed the baby spit up on the bed). After reading such sentences, participants correctly believed that the...

The “Good Enough” approach to language comprehension assumes that listeners do not always engage in full detailed processing of linguistic input. Rather, the system has a tendency to develop shallow and superficial representations when confronted with some difficulty. In this study, we investigated Good Enough processing using a challenging version of the Visual World Paradigm, in which partici...

This paper investigates the effect of quantification in sentence processing. The experimental results show that temporarily ambiguous sentences that begin with the universally quantified NPs reduced the garden path effect in contrast to the ones that begin with bare NPs. This fact is accounted for by assuming that discourse representation structures are incrementally constructed, and a triparti...

While the P600 is generally presumed to be a uniform response elicited consistently across individuals in specific syntactic contexts, Tanner and Van Hell (2014) showed evidence of distinct response profiles (N400 or P600 dominant) for syntactic violations across individuals. The current analysis used Tanner and Van Hell’s response-dominance index (RDI) to examine the impact of response dominan...

While previous research has shown that working memory capacity (WMC) predicts sentence processing ability, the understanding of the relationship is limited as almost all studies have used the reading span task as their sole measure of WMC. The current study examined how the effects of garden-path sentences and filler-gap dependencies (as indexed by the P600) related to four measures of working ...

In this ERP study we investigate the processes that occur in syntactically ambiguous German sentences at the point of disambiguation. Whereas most psycholinguistic theories agree on the view that processing difficulties arise when parsing preferences are disconfirmed (so-called garden-path effects), important differences exist with respect to theoretical assumptions about the parser's recovery ...

A striking property of the human parser is its efficiency and robustness. For the vast majority of sentences, the parser will effortlessly and rapidly deliver the correct analysis. In doing so, it is robust to noise, i.e., it can provide an analysis even if the input is distorted, e.g., by ungrammaticalities. Furthermore, the human parser achieves broad coverage: it deals with a wide variety of...

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to investigate neural correlates of early-closure garden-path sentence processing and use of extrasyntactic information to resolve temporary syntactic ambiguities. Sixteen participants performed an auditory picture verification task on sentences presented with natural versus flat intonation. Stimuli included sentences in which the garden-pat...