Psycholinguistic Perspectives on Garden-Path Sentence Processing
Article Sidebar
Dimensions.ai Badge
Main Article Content
Abstract
This study explores how readers process syntactic ambiguity in garden-path sentences, focusing on the cognitive effort involved in real-time reanalysis. Using both self-paced reading and eye-tracking methodologies, participants were presented with structurally ambiguous and unambiguous sentence pairs. Garden-path sentences elicited significantly longer reading times, increased regression rates, and lower comprehension accuracy compared to controls. These findings provide empirical support for hybrid parsing models that integrate both heuristic-based and constraint-driven mechanisms. Evidence also highlighted the role of working memory and individual variation in parsing flexibility, with higher-capacity readers demonstrating faster recovery from syntactic misdirection. The combined use of behavioral and visual tracking methods revealed the time course and complexity of syntactic reanalysis, including delayed processing at disambiguation points and elevated rates of backward eye movements. Results underscore the dynamic interaction between syntactic expectations and real-time adjustment, offering a nuanced view of how the human language system copes with ambiguity. This research contributes to current psycholinguistic theory by showing that sentence parsing is shaped by both general cognitive resources and probabilistic language knowledge. Garden-path structures remain a productive framework for probing the architecture and adaptability of the human parser.
Article Details
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
References
Arnold, J. E., Eisenband, J. G., Brown-Schmidt, S., & Trueswell, J. C. (2000). The rapid use of gender information: Evidence of the time course for pronoun resolution from eyetracking. Cognition, 76(1), B13–B26. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0010-0277(00)00073-1
Bates, D., Mächler, M., Bolker, B., & Walker, S. (2015). Fitting Linear Mixed-Effects Models Using lme4. Journal of Statistical Software, 67(1), 1–48. https://doi.org/10.18637/jss.v067.i01
Berestetska, N. (2013). Comparative analysis of lexical and grammatical characteristics of border discourse in Ukrainian and English. Scientific Notes of Vinnytsia Mykhailo Kotsiubynskyi State Pedagogical University. Series: Philology, 18, 402–408. http://nbuv.gov.ua/UJRN/Nzvdpu_filol_2013_18_83
Berestetska, N. V. (2011). Formation Of Translating Competence Of Future Officers-borderguards. Bulletin of Lviv State University of Life Safety, 5(2), 37-41. https://media.neliti.com/media/publications/314215-formation-of-translating-competence-of-f-91128c17.pdf
Clifton, C., Staub, A., & Rayner, K. (2007). Eye movements in reading words and sentences. In R. van Gompel, M. Fischer, W. Murray, & R. Hill (Eds.), Eye movements: A window on mind and brain (pp. 341–372). Elsevier. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-008044980-7/50017-3
Demberg, V., & Keller, F. (2008). Data from eye-tracking corpora as evidence for theories of syntactic processing complexity. Cognition, 109(2), 193-210. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2008.07.008
Dussias, P. E. (2003). Syntactic Ambiguity Resolution in L2 Learners: Some Effects of Bilinguality on L1 and L2 Processing Strategies. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 25, 529-557. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0272263103000238
Dussias, P. E., Valdés Kroff, J. R., Guzzardo Tamargo, R. E., & Gerfen, C. (2013). When gender and looking go hand in hand: Grammatical gender processing in L2 Spanish. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 35(2), 353–387. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0272263112000915
Engelhardt, P. E., Nigg, J. T., & Ferreira, F. (2017). Executive function and intelligence in the resolution of temporary syntactic ambiguity: an individual differences investigation. Quarterly journal of experimental psychology (2006), 70(7), 1263–1281. https://doi.org/10.1080/17470218.2016.1178785
Estremera, M. (2024). The CoP Theory in Reading Enhancement Programme(REP) from Pragmatic Lens of Language Development. EIKI Journal of Effective Teaching Methods, 2(1). https://doi.org/10.59652/jetm.v2i1.151
Ferreira, F., & Lowder, M. W. (2016). Prediction, information structure, and good-enough language processing. In J. M. Morisseau & J. C. Trueswell (Eds.), Mind and Language: Essays in Cognitive Science (pp. 115–139). Oxford University Press. https://ferreiralab.faculty.ucdavis.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/222/2015/05/Ferreira-Lowder-2016_Psych-of-Learning-Motivation.pdf
Frazier, L. (1987). Sentence processing: A tutorial review. In M. Coltheart (Ed.), Attention and performance 12: The psychology of reading (pp. 559–586). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
Frazier, L., & Rayner, K. (1982). Making and correcting errors during sentence comprehension: Eye movements in the analysis of structurally ambiguous sentences. Cognitive Psychology, 14(2), 178–210. https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0285(82)90008-1
Friederici, A. D. (2011). The brain basis of language processing: From structure to function. Physiological Reviews, 91(4), 1357–1392. https://doi.org/10.1152/physrev.00006.2011
Hale, J. (2001). A probabilistic Earley parser as a psycholinguistic model. In Proceedings of the Second Meeting of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics on Language Technologies (pp. 1–8). https://doi.org/10.3115/1073336.1073357
Hale, J., Dyer, C., Kuncoro, A., & Brennan, J. (2018). Finding syntax in human encephalography with beam search. In Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (pp. 2727–2736). Melbourne: Association for Computational Linguistics.
James, A. N., Fraundorf, S. H., Lee, E.-K., & Watson, D. G. (2018). Individual differences in syntactic processing: Is there evidence for reader-text interactions?. Journal of Memory and Language, 102, 155-181. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2018.05.006
Kaan, E., & Swaab, T. Y. (2002). The brain circuitry of syntactic comprehension. Trends in cognitive sciences, 6(8), 350–356. https://doi.org/10.1016/s1364-6613(02)01947-2
Kaan, E., Harris, A., Gibson, E., & Holcomb, P. (2000). The P600 as an index of syntactic integration difficulty. Language and Cognitive Processes, 15(2), 159–201. https://doi.org/10.1080/016909600386084
Kamide, Y., Altmann, G. T. M., & Haywood, S. L. (2003). The time-course of prediction in incremental sentence processing: Evidence from anticipatory eye movements. Journal of Memory and Language, 49(1), 133–156. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0749-596X(03)00023-8
Kuperman, V., Kyröläinen, A.-J., Porretta, V., Brysbaert, M., & Yang, S. (2021). A lingering question addressed: Reading rate and most efficient listening rate are highly similar. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 47(8), 1103–1112. https://doi.org/10.1037/xhp0000932
Levy, R. (2008). Expectation-based syntactic comprehension. Cognition, 106(3), 1126–1177. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2007.05.006
MacDonald, M. C., & Christiansen, M. H. (2002). Reassessing working memory: Comment on Just and Carpenter (1992) and Waters and Caplan (1996). Psychological Review, 109(1), 35–54. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.109.1.35
MacDonald, M. C., Pearlmutter, N. J., & Seidenberg, M. S. (1994). The lexical nature of syntactic ambiguity resolution. Psychological Review, 101(4), 676–703. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.101.4.676
Nelson, M. J., El Karoui, I., Giber, K., Yang, X., Cohen, L., Koopman, H., …Dehaene, S. (2017). Neurophysiological dynamics of phrase-structure building during sentence processing. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 114(18), E3669–E3678. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1701590114
Nguyen, T. C. N. (2024). English as the Pluricentric Language: Changes within the Educational Process. EIKI Journal of Effective Teaching Methods, 2(3). https://doi.org/10.59652/jetm.v2i3.250
Novick, J. M., Trueswell, J. C., & Thompson-Schill, S. L. (2005). Cognitive control and parsing: Reexamining the role of Broca’s area in sentence comprehension. Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience, 5(3), 263–281. https://doi.org/10.3758/CABN.5.3.263
Osterhout, L., & Holcomb, P. J. (1992). Event-related brain potentials elicited by syntactic anomaly. Journal of Memory and Language, 31(6), 785–806. https://doi.org/10.1016/0749-596X(92)90039-Z
Pickering, M. J., & Gambi, C. (2018). Predicting while comprehending language: A theory and review. Psychological bulletin, 144(10), 1002–1044. https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000158
Pickering, M. J., & Traxler, M. J. (2003). Evidence against the use of subcategorisation frequency in the processing of unbounded dependencies. Language & Cognitive Processes, 18, 469-503.
Rayner, K. (1998). Eye movements in reading and information processing: 20 years of research. Psychological bulletin, 124(3), 372–422. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.124.3.372
Rayner, K., Carlson, M. and Frazier, L. (1983) The Interaction of Syntax and Semantics during Sentence Processing: Eye Movements in the Analysis of Semantically Biased Sentences. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 22, 358-374.
Snedeker, J., & Trueswell, J. C. (2004). The developing constraints on parsing decisions: The role of lexical-biases and referential scenes in child and adult sentence processing. Cognitive Psychology, 49(3), 238–299. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cogpsych.2004.03.001
Staub A. (2010). Eye movements and processing difficulty in object relative clauses. Cognition, 116(1), 71–86. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2010.04.002
Staub, A. (2015). The effect of lexical predictability on eye movements in reading: Critical review and theoretical interpretation. Language and Linguistics Compass, 9(8), 311–327. https://doi.org/10.1111/lnc3.12151
Staub, A. (2024). The function/content word distinction and eye movements in reading. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 50(6), 967–984. https://doi.org/10.1037/xlm0001301
Staub, A., & Rayner, K. (2007). Eye movements and on-line comprehension processes. In M. G. Gaskell (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Psycholinguistics. Oxford Academic. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198568971.013.0019
Trueswell, J. C., & Tanenhaus, M. K. (1994). Toward a lexicalist framework of constraint-based syntactic ambiguity resolution. In C. Clifton, Jr., L. Frazier, & K. Rayner (Eds.), Perspectives on sentence processing (pp. 155–179). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
van Dyke, J. A., & Lewis, R. L. (2003). Distinguishing effects of structure and decay on attachment and repair: A cue-based parsing account of recovery from misanalyzed ambiguities. Journal of Memory and Language, 49(3), 285–316. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0749-596X(03)00081-0
Vosse, T., & Kempen, G. (2000). Syntactic structure assembly in human parsing: a computational model based on competitive inhibition and a lexicalist grammar. Cognition, 75(2), 105-143. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0010-0277(00)00063-9
Wells, J. B., Christiansen, M. H., Race, D. S., Acheson, D. J., & MacDonald, M. C. (2009). Experience and sentence processing: Statistical learning and relative clause comprehension. Cognitive Psychology, 58(2), 250–271. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cogpsych.2008.08.002