Many theories have been proposed to explain difficulty with center embedded constructions, most attributing the problem to some kind of limited-capacity short-term memory. However, these theories have developed for the most part independently of more traditional memory research, which has focused on uncovering general principles such as chunking and interference. This article attempts to gain s...

By integrating syntactic and semantic processing, our parser (LAZY) is able to deterministically parse sentences which syntactically appear to be garden path sentences although native speakers do not need conscious reanalysis to understand them. LAZY comprises an extension to conceptual analysis which yields an explicit representation of syntactic information and a flexible interaction between ...

In the current study, we examined the role of intelligence and executive functions in the resolution of temporary syntactic ambiguity using an individual differences approach. Data were collected from 174 adolescents and adults who completed a battery of cognitive tests as well as a sentence comprehension task. The critical items for the comprehension task consisted of object/subject garden pat...

Which repair strategy does the language system deploy when it gets garden-pathed, and what can regressive eye movements in reading tell us about reanalysis strategies? Several influential eye-tracking studies on syntactic reanalysis (Frazier & Rayner, 1982; Meseguer, Carreiras, & Clifton, 2002; Mitchell, Shen, Green, & Hodgson, 2008) have addressed this question by examining scanpaths, i.e., se...

The disambiguation of a syntactically ambiguous sentence in favor less preferred parse can lead to slower reading at the point. This phenomenon, referred as garden-path effect, has motivated models which readers initially maintain only subset possible parses sentence, and subsequently require time-consuming reanalysis reconstruct discarded parse. A more recent proposal argues that effect be red...

This thesis gives a theory of sentence comprehension that attempts to explain a number of linguistic performance effects, including garden-path effects, preferred readings for ambiguous input and processing overload effects. It is hypothesized that the human parser heuristically determines its options based upon evaluation of possible representations with respect to lexical, syntactic, semantic...

Studies on garden-path sentences such as While the man hunted the deer ran into the woods have shown that comprehenders face processing difficulties due to the locally ambiguous noun phrase “the deer”. This critical noun phrase tends to be initially interpreted as the object of the preceding verb, but it must ultimately be interpreted as the subject of the following clause. This grammatical rol...

In 3 experiments, the author examined how readers' eye movements are influenced by joint manipulations of a word's frequency and the syntactic fit of the word in its context. In the critical conditions of the first 2 experiments, a high- or low-frequency verb was used to disambiguate a garden-path sentence, while in the last experiment, a high- or low-frequency verb constituted a phrase structu...

One needs to determine rst what is a natural preferred analysis. On the one hand, a selective ranking of alternatives seems to be the correct choice. Observationally, we remark that people impose rather strong restrictions on the preferred analyses they assign to an ambiguous sentence, which is often not even perceived as ambiguous. In some cases, speakers do not realize that a sentence is ambi...