Linguistics Research Today is a free monthly online journal that collates and summarizes the latest research about Linguistics, including details on human language, phonetics, syntax, phonology.

Semantic re-interpretation and garden path recovery.

Sturt P

University of Edinburgh, The School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, 7, George Square, Edinburgh, UK. patrick.sturt@ed.ac.uk

Participant's eye-movements were recorded while they read locally ambiguous sentences. Evidence for processing difficulty was found when the interpretation of the initially preferred misanalysis clashed with that of the globally correct analysis, demonstrating the persistence of the earlier interpretation. Processing difficulty associated with the syntactic reanalysis was largely localised to the disambiguating region, with difficulty due to semantic persistence occurring later. The results show that semantic persistence is not limited to extreme cases of parse failure, and can occur even when reanalysis is relatively straightforward.

Published 10 September 2007 in Cognition, 105(2): 477-88.
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