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...

This paper presents a semantic model for Chinese garden-path sentences. Based on the Sentence Degeneration model of HNC theory, a garden-path can arise from two types of ambiguities: SD type ambiguity and NP allocated ambiguity. This paper provides an approach to process garden-paths, in which ambiguity detection and analysis take the place of revision. The performance of the approach is evalua...

Previous studies have reported that temporarily ambiguous sentences sometimes cause reading disruption (garden-path effects). These interpreted their finding as indicating the human sentence processing device (the processor) initially assigns incorrect structures and subsequently attempts revision. That is a logical interpretation. However, no previous demonstrated evidence of causal relationsh...

In the literature dealing with the reanalysis of garden path sentences such as While the man hunted the deer ran into the woods, it is generally assumed either that people completely repair their initial incorrect syntactic representations to yield a final interpretation whose syntactic structure is fully consistent with the input string or that the parse fails. In a series of five experiments,...

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...

A garden-path sentence has temporary ambiguity that a reader or listener need to resolve. Prosody is well-known to have effects on sentence comprehension so it is expected that it will affect the interpretation of garden-path sentences. However, in an auditory comprehension test with natural speech, the garden-path effect may be unclear because a listener can typically resolve the ambiguity and...

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 ...