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We report 3 experiments that examined younger and older adults' reliance on "good-enough" interpretations for garden-path sentences (e.g., "While Anna dressed the baby played in the crib") as indicated by their responding "Yes" to questions probing the initial, syntactically unlicensed interpretation (e.g., "Did Anna dress the baby?"). The manipulation of several factors expected to influence the probability of generating or maintaining the unlicensed interpretation resulted in 2 major age differences: Older adults were generally more likely to endorse the incorrect interpretation for sentences containing optionally transitive verbs (e.g., hunted, paid), and they showed decreased availability of the correct interpretation of subordinate clauses containing reflexive absolute transitive verbs (e.g., dress, bathe). These age differences may in part be linked to older adults' increased reliance on heuristic-like good-enough processing to compensate for age-related deficits in working memory capacity. The results support previous studies suggesting that syntactic reanalysis may not be an all-or-nothing process and might not be completed unless questions probing unresolved aspects of the sentence structure challenge the resultant interpretation.In a recent series of articles, Christianson, Ferreira, and colleagues (Christianson, 2002;Christianson, Hollingworth, Halliwell, & Ferreira, 2001;Ferreira, 2003;Ferreira, Bailey, & Ferraro, 2002;Ferreira & Henderson, 1999) have presented evidence of shallow, or in their terms "good-enough" sentence processing. The overarching claim of this line of research is that on at least some occasions people may come away with interpretations of certain types of sentences that do not faithfully represent the true content of the sentences. In these articles, the authors point out that within the realm of cognitive psychology it is not controversial that mental representations of sensory information are often underspecified in some ways. For example, in the field of visual cognition, research has shown that viewers of a scene do not construct a veridical copy of that scene in their heads (Henderson & Hollingworth, 1999;Irwin, 1996;Simons & Levin, 1997). Likewise in the fields of judgment and decision-making (e.g., Kahneman, Slovic, & Tversky, 1982) heuristic-based decisionmaking allows for fast and frugal integration of input with less expenditure of both cognitive resources and time. The results in both cases are usually adequate, but they are occasionally wrong in predictable and testable ways.Given that time, attention, and processing resources are limited in most real-world information processing tasks, including language, suspecting that the human sentence processor might be Correspondence should be addressed to Kiel Christianson, Department of Educational Psychology, University of Illinois, Education Building, Room 226A, MC-708, 1310 S. 6th Street, Champaign, IL 61820. E-mail: kiel@uiuc.edu. NIH Public Access Author ManuscriptDiscourse Process. Author manuscript; available i...

Recent work has suggested that readers' initial and incorrect interpretation of temporarily ambiguous ("garden path") sentences (e.g., Christianson, Hollingworth, Halliwell, & Ferreira, 2001) sometimes lingers even after attempts at reanalysis. These lingering effects have been attributed to incomplete reanalysis. In two eye tracking experiments, we distinguish between two types of incompleteness: the language comprehension system might not build a faithful syntactic structure, or it might not fully erase the structure built during an initial misparse. The first experiment used reflexive binding and the Gender Mismatch paradigm to show that a complete and faithful structure is built following processing of the garden-path. The second experiment used two-sentence texts to examine the extent to which the garden-path meaning from the first sentence interferes with reading of the second.Together, the results indicate that misinterpretation effects are attributable not to failure in building a proper structure, but rather to failure in cleaning up all remnants of earlier attempts to build that syntactic representation.3

Three masked-prime naming experiments were conducted to examine the impact of morpheme boundaries on letter transposition confusability effects. In Experiment 1, the priming effects of primes containing letter transpositions within (sunhsine) and transpositions across (susnhine) the constituents of compound words were compared with correctly spelled primes and primes containing letter substitutions in naming correctly spelled targets. Primes containing transpositions within morphemes facilitated naming as much as correctly spelled primes. Primes with transpositions across morphemes did not facilitate naming more than primes with letter substitutions. Experiment 2 replicated Experiment 1 and extended the effects to so-called pseudocompounds (mayhem). Experiment 3 extended the results to agentive derivational morphology (boaster). The results are discussed in the context of visual word recognition.

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We report a replication and extension of Ferreira (2003), in which it was observed that native adult English speakers misinterpret passive sentences that relate implausible but not impossible semantic relationships (e.g., The angler was caught by the fish) significantly more often than they do plausible passives or plausible or implausible active sentences. In the experiment reported here, participants listened to the same plausible and implausible passive and active sentences as in Ferreira (2003), answered comprehension questions, and then orally described line drawings of simple transitive actions. The descriptions were analyzed as a measure of structural priming (Bock, 1986). Question accuracy data replicated Ferreira (2003). Production data yielded an interaction: Passive descriptions were produced more often after plausible passives and implausible actives. We interpret these results as indicative of a language processor that proceeds along differentiated morphosyntactic and semantic routes. The processor may end up adjudicating between conflicting outputs from these routes by settling on a "good enough" representation that is not completely faithful to the input.

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